EPC Unscripted: Hiring in design.
EPC Unscripted brought together 3 design leaders and a room of designers for an honest, unscripted conversation on hiring in 2026—what’s broken, what’s changing, and what it really takes to get hired or hire well today.
At EPC Unscripted, the pack at the collective brought together three design leaders who are actively hiring, building teams, and navigating the messiness of finding great design talent in 2026 and asked them to be completely unscripted about it.
Bikash Biswas, Head of Design at Ather Energy, has grown with the company across vehicle design, product architecture, and now design leadership — giving him a rare view of what it takes to build and hire for a team in one of India's most ambitious mobility companies.
Naveen Mamgain, Head of Design at Rapido, has spent his career designing for high-frequency, everyday mobility challenges in India — which means he thinks hard about scale, speed, and what "good" actually looks like when millions of real people depend on your decisions.
Hyden Lopez, VP and Head of Design at Acko, brings nearly 18 years of experience across some of the most complex design environments, from aviation systems at Honeywell to Atlassian, and now leads design at one of India's most interesting insurtech companies.
Joining them was a room full of practising designers from across organisations — at different levels, in different domains, with different frustrations. Followed was part panel discussion, part open Q&A, part honest debate, and entirely the kind of conversation the design industry doesn't have enough of.
It was real talk about what's broken, what's changing, and what it actually takes to get hired or hire well, in design today. The following are 8 major areas that were discussed in the session.
