Mumbai is India’s financial capital and the country’s densest concentration of corporate headquarters, BFSI institutions, FMCG majors and D2C brands. That also makes it one of the most competitive markets in India to launch a product, redesign a service, or shift an organisation’s culture. Teams here don’t lack ambition or capital. What most Mumbai organisations are missing is a disciplined way to find out what’s actually worth building before engineering, marketing and sales spend gets committed to it. That is what design thinking consulting and training is for.
In short: Humane Design is a Mumbai-based design thinking consulting and training firm, headquartered in Andheri West, that helps corporates, MSMEs and funded startups turn ambiguous problems into validated products, services and culture change. We run in-person workshops and certification training out of our Mumbai studio, and embedded consulting engagements for teams anywhere in India, using proprietary Design Thinking, Agility and Storytelling toolkits.
What design thinking actually delivers: the evidence
“Design thinking” gets used loosely enough that it’s worth being precise about what the research actually shows, rather than repeating the vaguest version of the claim.
| Source | Finding | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| McKinsey, The Business Value of Design | Top-quartile scorers on McKinsey’s Design Index grew revenue 32 percentage points faster and delivered 56 percentage points higher shareholder returns than peers over five years, across medtech, consumer goods and retail banking. | Design maturity is a measurable driver of financial performance, not a soft benefit. |
| Forrester, The ROI of Design Thinking | Mature design thinking practices return 71%–107% ROI, with individual projects often more than doubling their investment. | A design thinking capability pays for itself well within a normal budget cycle. |
| Pendo, 2019 Feature Adoption Report | Across 615 subscriptions, roughly 80% of software features are rarely or never used. | Most product roadmaps are full of unvalidated guesses, which is exactly what design thinking is built to filter out. |
| IBM Design | 62% of designers on agile teams say colleagues don’t understand what discovery work contributes to delivery. | Even mature design organisations have to actively defend research time. It doesn’t happen by default. |
The pattern across all four: organisations that build in structured discovery outperform ones that don’t, and the gap is wide enough to show up in revenue, shareholder returns and product usage, not just workshop satisfaction scores.
Why Mumbai companies need this now
Mumbai’s commercial weight is well established: it’s home to the BSE and NSE, the largest share of India’s BFSI headquarters, and a dense FMCG and media cluster. What’s changed in the last few years is the innovation layer sitting on top of that base.
- Mumbai is now home to 21 unicorn startups, the third-largest concentration in India after Bengaluru (55) and Gurugram (22), according to Tracxn’s August 2026 tracker.
- Dealroom’s Mumbai ecosystem profile puts the combined enterprise value of Mumbai-headquartered startups at roughly $244 billion, backed by close to $2.8 billion in cumulative VC investment.
- That growth sits on top of legacy BFSI, FMCG and manufacturing giants that are themselves under pressure to modernise products, services and internal culture rather than lose share to faster-moving challengers.
The result is a city where an established bank, a 40-year-old FMCG house and a three-year-old fintech are all competing for the same customer’s attention, often within a few kilometres of each other in the same business districts. The organisations that win are the ones that can validate an idea with real users before committing a quarter’s roadmap to it. That is precisely the gap design thinking consulting and training is built to close.
Our design thinking services in Mumbai
If you’re comparing design agencies in Mumbai, it’s worth knowing what makes a design thinking consultancy different: an agency typically designs the thing you’ve already decided to build. We work a step earlier: establishing whether it’s worth building at all, and what “it” should actually be, before a single screen or product spec gets designed.
Humane Design runs three connected practice areas out of our Mumbai studio, each aimed at a different point in an organisation’s innovation problem.
Design thinking consulting
Embedded engagements where our team works alongside yours on a live problem: new product or service discovery, systems and process redesign, or innovation culture design. We draw on our proprietary Design Thinking, Agility and Storytelling toolkits. See our consulting services →
Design thinking training and certification
Instructor-led workshops and certification programmes for teams that need to build the capability in-house, run either at our Andheri West studio or on-site at your Mumbai office. See our learning services →
Innovation and culture design
Longer-horizon work aimed at making design thinking a standing organisational habit rather than a one-off event: mindsets, skillsets and belief systems, scaled through small, visible wins rather than a mandate from the top.
| Engagement format | Typical duration | Best for | What you leave with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery sprint / workshop | 1–5 days | Getting unstuck on a specific product, service or process decision | A tested prototype, validated assumptions, and a clear next step |
| Certification training | 2–4 days | Building in-house design thinking capability across a team or function | Practitioners certified to run their own discovery work |
| Embedded consulting retainer | 3–12 months | Organisations building a durable discovery practice, not a single project | A working discovery process, trained internal champions, and a track record of decisions changed by evidence |
Our approach
We work from the same underlying method used across the industry (empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test), but run it through three proprietary toolkits built specifically for Indian corporates, MSMEs and funded startups:
- Design Thinking: structured discovery that turns ambiguous problems into tested, evidence-backed opportunities.
- Agility: translating validated opportunities into a delivery process your engineering and operations teams can actually execute against.
- Storytelling: building the internal narrative that gets a validated idea funded, adopted and sustained past the pilot stage, which is where most good discovery work in Indian organisations actually dies.
Humane Design works with corporates, MSMEs and funded startups across sectors, including FMCG, BFSI and technology, and reports a 98% client success rate against engagement goals, the same standard we hold every Mumbai engagement to.
Frequently asked questions
What does a design thinking consultant in Mumbai actually do?
A design thinking consultant runs structured research, framing and prototyping work with your team to test whether a product, service or process idea is worth building, before your organisation commits engineering or marketing budget to it. In practice this means facilitated workshops, customer interviews, rapid prototyping and evidence-based recommendations, not just a slide deck of ideas.
How is design thinking training different from design thinking consulting?
Training builds the capability inside your team: your people learn to run discovery themselves. Consulting is Humane Design running discovery on a live problem alongside your team. Most Mumbai organisations start with a workshop or short consulting engagement on a real problem, then move into certification training once they’ve seen the method work.
How long does a typical design thinking workshop take?
Most discovery workshops run one to five days depending on the scope of the problem. Certification training programmes typically run two to four days. Longer embedded consulting retainers, aimed at building a durable in-house discovery practice, run from three months to a year.
Is design thinking only useful for tech products?
No. The evidence base spans medical technology, consumer goods and retail banking as much as software, and Humane Design’s own Mumbai client base includes FMCG, BFSI and services organisations alongside technology teams. Design thinking applies to any product, service, process or culture problem where you’re not yet certain what “worth building” looks like.
Do you run design thinking workshops in Mumbai in person or online?
Both. Our studio is in Andheri West, Mumbai, and we run in-person workshops and training there or on-site at your offices. We also run remote and hybrid engagements for distributed teams.
How much does design thinking consulting or training cost in Mumbai?
It depends on the format: a single discovery workshop, a certification programme, and a multi-month embedded retainer sit at very different price points. Get in touch with your specific goal and team size and we’ll scope it properly rather than quote a generic number that won’t hold up.
Ready to turn a Mumbai team’s ambition into a validated product, service or culture change? Talk to us or find us at F-604, Remi Bizcourt, Off Veera Desai Road, Andheri West, Mumbai 400053.
