Résumé
Nishant Kaku
Product design and research leader who builds design functions from the ground up. Director at Housing.com (12M+ monthly active users), previously at Cashfree Payments, Domino’s and Info Edge (99acres, Shiksha).
20+ years in design, 13+ in product and UX, 15+ leading design teams. Open to Head of Design and Design Director roles in any industry.
Gurugram, India · Open to relocation · nishant.kaku@gmail.com
Experience
Twenty years, from the craft to leading the function.
Housing.com
Dec 2025 – Present
REA India · Gurugram
Director, Design & Research
Head design and research for a property portal with 12M+ monthly active users, across consumer, seller and broker products. 7-member team embedded in product squads, reporting to the CPO.
Led design of the login rebuild with Product and Engineering, which added 40K leads a month and raised login rate 10%.
Led design of the search and filter rebuild, raising search-results reach 11% and filter usage 30%, and adding 10K leads a month.
Established the Bricks design system (tokens, core components, governance), cutting component delivery from 2 weeks to 2 days.
Built research capability within the design team, coaching designers to run studies independently; introduced a competency framework and regular design critiques. Studies include a 140-renter survey, and buyer research that helped reshape the new-projects roadmap.
Took Houzy, a conversational AI property-search experience, from concept to beta, defining its persona, failure handling and adaptive results UI.
Cashfree Payments
Aug 2022 – Nov 2025
Bengaluru
Associate Director, UX
Led UX strategy and a team of 8 through Cashfree’s shift from enterprise-led sales to a self-serve SME platform, across onboarding, KYC, payment integration, dashboard and mobile app.
Lifted signup-to-KYC conversion 17% and cut completion time from 21 to 13 minutes by simplifying an 8-step onboarding flow.
Cut support tickets 46%, grew active users 32% and reduced uninstalls 18% by rebuilding the post-onboarding merchant experience.
Raised activation-to-transaction conversion 3.5%, with 87% completion on the redesigned self-integration journey.
Built four SMB merchant personas from a cross-functional workshop and journey maps, which defined the SMB charter and aligned the functions around it.
Mapped the merchant journey in service blueprints with Legal, Operations, Sales, Banking Alliances and Customer Success.
Jubilant FoodWorks
Oct 2020 – Jul 2022
Domino’s, Popeyes · Noida
Lead Manager, UX
Headed UX design and research for Domino’s and Popeyes. Built the function from 1 to 15, with a research practice and a design system.
Led Domino’s India’s first major UX overhaul in 15 years, delivering ₹20 Cr in incremental annual revenue and ₹1 Cr in annual cost savings.
Lifted new-user conversion 20.3% and store-pickup conversion 46% with the address and location revamp.
Took app ratings to lifetime highs of 4.7 on iOS and 4.2 on Android, and led the 0-to-1 digital launch of Popeyes India.
Info Edge
Apr 2014 – Sep 2020
99acres, Shiksha · Noida
Principal Designer, UX
Design lead across Shiksha (ed-tech) and 99acres (property listings).
Grew registrations 150% year on year through a personalisation programme.
Led the revamp of internal CRM, CMS and LMS tools used by sales and content teams.
Earlier
2005 – 2014
India Today, Paytm, Brentwoods
Art direction and visual design
Creative Lead at Brentwoods Education and Assistant Manager, Graphics at Paytm (2013 – 2014).
Deputy Art Director at India Today Group, leading creative teams from 2010 (2008 – 2013).
Graphic Designer at Horizon Print Services (2005 – 2008).
Education
Executive MBA, design training and UX certifications.
Indian School of Business
2021 – 2022
Hyderabad
PGPpro (Executive MBA)
Leadership & Strategy
Arunachal University of Studies
2011 – 2013
MFA, Animation
Human Factors International
2015
Certified Usability Architect (CUA™)
Licence 2015-5831 · Verify credential ↗
Human Factors International
2018
Certified Experience Architect (CXA™)
Licence 2018-520 · Verify credential ↗
Skills
What I bring to a design organisation.
Leadership
Design strategy, team building and coaching, org design, design operations, executive stakeholder management.
Craft and tools
Design systems, user research, conversational UX, prototyping, AI-assisted design and research workflows, Figma, Framer, n8n.
AI
Conversational search design (Houzy), an AI portfolio assistant built on Cloudflare Workers and LLM APIs, agentic research workflows in n8n.
Speaking & Writing
Talks, panels and essays.
Talks
Talks and panels at IIITDM Jabalpur, Shiv Nadar University, Bennett University and Chitkara University.
Writing
Articles on design leadership, design debt and AI adoption at nishantkaku.com/writing.