Santosh S monogram

About / The person behind the work

Design, leadership, business and technology — in one practice.

I use empathy, storytelling and data-driven insight to craft solutions that help businesses win. A career spanning academia, entrepreneurship, sales, marketing, HR and finance gives me a 360° view of business challenges.

Santosh outdoors, smiling while feeding an alpaca
Santosh · Director of Business and Design, Indexnine

As an ethical design leader and problem solver, I don’t just design solutions — I enable businesses to win.

Product design leadership with strategic depth

I bring together strategic vision, hands-on craft and business fluency. I’ve grown a solo practice into a 7-member design team, and later helped scale a 4 to 48 designer organisation in India across complex, enterprise-scale initiatives.

My leadership style echoes Netflix’s “No Rules Rules” — freedom, responsibility, radical honesty and a high-performance culture. I don’t just lead designers; I help grow decision makers.

I stay deeply hands-on — crafting high-stakes deliverables and facilitating design sprints. Credibility is earned not just in the boardroom, but in the Figma files with other designers.

I speak business and design alike, aligning teams not only to OKRs but to revenue levers, retention drivers and long-term strategy.

Information design

I specialise in the last-mile delivery of data-driven insights, where impact is made or lost. For over a decade, I’ve taught professionals to communicate data through stories, not just charts.

My process is tool-agnostic and principle-first: start with context, prioritise the insights that drive action, choose visuals that support understanding and remove clutter. Information design isn’t just how data looks — it’s how well it works.

Communication strategy

I’m expanding my Communicating with Data work into a broader communication strategy toolkit for modern leaders, through a focused programme in Communication Strategies at IIM Calcutta.

I’m especially interested in how human-centred communication combined with agentic execution can power seamless, intelligent workflows.

See the full career

Toolkit

What I build with.

Figma

Product design & systems

Sketch

Interface design

Tableau

Data storytelling

Claude

AI thinking partner

Lovable

AI product building

Base44

Rapid AI prototyping

The next chapter

Let’s build what comes next.

Design vision. Strong teams. Products that earn trust.

Let’s talk