Senior Executive Design Leader · Singapore · 10+ years
I'm Kishore Kumar, a Senior Executive Design Leader with 12+ years of experience based in Singapore. My career has been defined by founding moments and scale. I spent nearly 7 years at Google — a FAANG company — as a Design Manager, where I was Founding Designer on Google Tez, the payments product that became Google Pay, scaling it from an initial concept to over 150 million monthly active users.
Since , I have been the Founding Designer and Head of Design & Product at Arta Finance, where I built the entire Design and Product function from Day 1. Beyond the product itself, I have played a direct role in the company's growth trajectory — contributing to multiple rounds of funding and establishing large-scale B2B partnerships that have shaped Arta's market position.
Across 12+ years of design leadership — spanning a FAANG company and a high-growth startup — my work sits at the intersection of design craft, product strategy, and organizational leadership. I've hired and managed globally distributed design teams, built design cultures from scratch, and shipped products used by hundreds of millions of people.
Good design at scale is not decoration — it's the difference between a product people use and a product people love. The best design decisions are indistinguishable from product decisions.
When building for the next billion users, I learned that constraint is the mother of clarity. Limited bandwidth, first-time smartphone users, low digital literacy — designing through those constraints sharpens every instinct you have about what actually matters.
Head of Design & Product
Full-time · Founding TeamJoined as the Founding Designer from the company's first days. Built the entire Design and Product function from zero — establishing the design process, hiring the team, defining product strategy, and shaping the design culture of a digital wealth management platform. Arta Finance was formerly operating as Arbo Works.
Design Manager
Google Pay · Next Billion UsersFounding Designer on Google Tez — the payments product that became Google Pay. Scaled from initial concept to 150,000,000+ monthly active users. Managed a globally distributed design team across multiple time zones and markets. Core member of Google's Next Billion Users initiative, designing products for first-time internet users in India and emerging markets.
kishore.n.kumar@gmail.com · LinkedIn · Singapore