TinkerLabs
Website:
tinkerlabs.in
Job details:
TinkerLabs is a behavioural design firm in Mumbai. For over a decade, we've helped organisations understand people and design interventions that change what they do.
We're good at the human side. We don't always ask early enough whether the business can carry it: what it costs, who pays, and whether it lasts.
That's the gap this role fills, in our clients' work and in our own. The job has two halves.
Outward, you'll be the business and feasibility voice inside deeply user-focused work, on projects spanning sales transformation, customer insight, financial inclusion and public health.
Inward, TinkerLabs will be your client too. We're in a growth phase with more doors open than we can walk through. You'll work alongside the founder to decide which ones matter. Then you'll build the systems, from how we sell to how we deliver, that let us walk through them without breaking.
What you'll do
On client work
Be the viability voice. Sit inside behavioural research and design projects and hold the commercial question open: unit economics, cost to serve, market size, competitive dynamics, what the client's P&L can actually absorb. Not as the final gate at the end. From the first week, alongside the researchers.
Conduct real business research. Market and category analysis, competitor mapping, business model teardowns, secondary data, expert conversations. Our user research is strong. This is the other half of the picture, and we want it just as rigorous.
Design the model, not just the solution. Value propositions, revenue models, pricing, go-to-market, service blueprints. Turn a good idea into something with a path to being real.
Facilitate. Co-creation sessions with clients, and workshops for corporate and academic audiences. You'll be in front of a room regularly.
On TinkerLabs
Look far, look near: help us choose where to grow. We have more avenues than capacity: new sectors, new clients, new offerings, new ways to package what we know. You'll work with the core team to size them, pressure-test them and pick. Then you'll work out the how: what it takes, who does it, and in what order.
Be systematic, like a mathematics professor. Treat the firm as a design problem. How does a lead become a proposal? How does a proposal become a priced, staffed project? How does that project run week to week and close well? Too much of our work lives in people's heads. You'll map how we actually work, find where it breaks, and redesign it.
Build the pitch and the narrative. Approach notes, proposals, positioning. This includes the question every firm like ours is being asked right now: what does AI change about what we do, and where do we stand? We have a point of view forming. You'll help us sharpen it.
The split between the two halves will shift. Some months will be mostly client work, others mostly internal.
Who we need
Our team has come from anthropology, psychology, design, engineering, architecture and business. Your background matters less than what it lets you do. That said, you should bring:
3+ years in the right kind of room. Strategy consulting, business design, product strategy, growth, venture building, corporate strategy or founder's office. An MBA is welcome, not required.
Real commercial instinct. You can look at a business and quickly see how it makes money and where that breaks.
Systems you've built that people actually used. Processes, pipelines, pricing models, project rhythms. Not decks about systems. Bonus if you did it inside a firm that was growing while you built it.
The ability to turn a half-formed question into a plan. A lot of the internal work will start as a hunch. You'll need to shape it, push back when it's the wrong question, and see it through.
The ability to hold a room. From a CXO challenging your numbers to a client's frontline team wondering why you're there.
What is in it for you (beside the core role)
We don't stop at the deck. We find the behaviour, design the intervention, put it in the field, and stay until it works. You'll see the whole arc, from the first insight to whether it actually worked.
We're small and growing fast. Whoever joins now shapes what we become.
Here's what that means concretely.
You'll design the firm, not just the projects. You'll decide which sectors we go after, how we sell, how we price and how we deliver, working directly with the core team.
You'll get range you won't find anywhere else. We've worked with Microsoft, HUL, Flipkart, Swiggy, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Vodafone, The Oberoi Group, GAP and Raymond. We've also worked with PATH, UNFPA, GIZ, Population Council, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Gates Foundation. Banking, retail, public health, technology, hospitality, gender, education. A sales transformation one month, financial inclusion for low-income women the next.
You'll have a seat at the centre of the work. You won't be handed insights to monetise. You'll be in the research, in the design, and in the pitch.
You'll join a team that makes you better. Small, sharp, supportive, and serious about craft.
How to apply
Besides sharing your CV, please respond to two short prompts. We're interested in how you think, not how polished it looks.
- Pick a product or service you think is genuinely well designed but commercially broken. What's wrong with the model, and what would you change?
- AI is changing what clients will pay consultants for. Using real evidence, tell us what's losing value, what's gaining value, and where a firm like ours should stand.
Answer in any format that does the thinking justice.
Send your responses, updated CV and portfolio to curious@tinkerlabs.in with the subject line Business Designer_(Your name).
A human reads every application. You'll hear back from us either way.
Click on Apply to know more.