Head of Product Design

At iKhokha, design isn’t decoration, it’s a strategic advantage.

Step in as our Head of Product Design and own the craft, the systems, and the vision that shape how thousands of businesses experience our products every day.

So, what will you do? 

You will be responsible for setting the vision, standards, and operating model for design at iKhokha.

This role goes beyond managing designers or approving UI. It exists to ensure that design is a competitive advantage for iKhokha; through deep customer empathy, strong UX thinking, high-quality UI execution, and a scalable design system that enables fast, consistent delivery across product and engineering teams.

You will be accountable for:

• The quality and coherence of UX and UI across the entire product ecosystem.
• The maturity of the design function, including people, processes, and standards.
• The design system and design-to-engineering handover process.
• Helping iKhokha differentiate at the experience layer, not just features.
• Progressively closing the gap between design and front-end implementation, including the use of AI-assisted tooling where appropriate.

This is a hands-on leadership role: strategic where it matters, operational where needed, and visible across the organisation.

In addition to the above, you will: 

Own the end-to-end design vision for iKhokha’s products and be responsible for ensuring that:

• UX and UI decisions are grounded in deep problem understanding, not just aesthetics.
• Design work consistently reflects merchant needs, business outcomes, and technical realities.
• Design quality improves year-on-year, not just through polish, but through better thinking.

Be the owner and steward of the iKhokha design system. This is a first-class responsibility, not a side project. Accountabilities include:

• Defining, maintaining, and evolving the design system (components, patterns, tokens, guidelines).
• Ensuring adoption across product and engineering teams.
• Making the design system a speed enabler, not a constraint.
• Partnering closely with Engineering to ensure design system components are buildable, performant, and reused.

Be accountable for building a strong, confident, and increasingly autonomous design team. This includes:

• Coaching designers to move beyond UI execution into UX thinking and problem framing.
• Developing designers’ ability to articulate rationale, trade-offs, and business value.
• Creating clear expectations around quality, ownership, and accountability.
• Ensuring each designer has a development plan aligned to both team and company needs.

The Head of Product Design is a visible product leader, not someone who operates in a design silo. You are expected to:

• Actively participate in senior leadership and portfolio discussions.
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Growth, and Operations leaders.
• Adapt communication style to different audiences, from designers to executives.
• Clearly articulate the business value of design decisions, not just the craft.

The Head of Product Design is responsible for materially improving the handover and translation from design to build. This includes:

• Improving how designs are specified, validated, and handed over to engineers.
• Exploring modern workflows where design outputs move closer to production-ready artefacts.

Leveraging AI-assisted tools (where appropriate) to:

• Accelerate iteration.
• Reduce manual handoff friction.
• Enable designers to experiment with front-end concepts more directly.