The UX Leader Who Redefined Success on His Own Terms

Heershil Parmar: The Designer Who Was Never Supposed to Be Here

From a disrupted dream to designing for millions, the unconventional rise of one of India’s most quietly influential UX leaders.

The acceptance was in hand. The plans were made. And then, without warning, everything stopped.

No international degree. No foreign network. No clean start. Just a young man back in India, staring at a future that no longer looked the way he had drawn it and a choice between grieving the plan or building something entirely new from whatever was left.

Heershil Parmar, UX and Product Design Leader, chose to build.

What followed was not a straight line. It was fourteen years of walking into rooms where design was still an argument, not a department, where UX had to be explained before it could be respected, and where the absence of a pedigreed degree meant every result had to speak twice as loud. He started where the work was available: 3D animation, interface projects, anything that kept him close to how people experience technology. He taught himself what no classroom had offered. He built a philosophy not from theory but from the friction of solving real problems at real scale.

That philosophy eventually landed him at Reliance Jio, where he designed digital products for over 150 million users during India’s most explosive period of digital adoption, building for audiences with multilingual needs, low-end devices, and varying levels of digital literacy. It was the kind of scale that exposes every assumption a designer carries. It sharpened him in ways a comfortable career never could have.

Today, Heershil Parmar serves as Associate Vice President of Product Design at Kotak Securities, leading user experience strategy for one of India’s largest retail broking platforms. The work is unforgiving by nature in financial products, a poorly designed interaction does not just frustrate a user, it costs them money. Hundreds of thousands of people make real financial decisions daily through experiences his team builds. That weight is not lost on him. It is, in fact, what drives him.

Along the way, he completed an advanced programme in design thinking and artificial intelligence at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, deepening his understanding of where human-centred design and emerging technology intersect at the highest levels of business and innovation. He has mentored over 200 designers, conducted workshops across India, and written extensively on FinTech UX and design systems.

In 2026, Heershil Parmar was honoured as one of the 40 Under 40 Industry Leaders, a recognition that places him among India’s most consequential emerging voices in business and technology.

The plan that collapsed years ago pointed nowhere near here. What replaced it turned out to be something more honest: a career built entirely on persistence, craft, and the stubborn belief that design, done right, changes how people live.

Some disruptions, it turns out, are the best thing that has ever happened to you.