Lead Product Designer - eCommerce

With a growing global subscriber base and a reputation for insightful analysis and opinion on every aspect of world events, The Economist is one of the most widely recognised and well-read current affairs publications and the foundation of our digital consumer product portfolio. We are developing a world-class product and design organisation and have an exciting opportunity for a Lead Product Designer to lead and manage the e-commerce and subscriptions design team. 

The role

We are looking for a Lead Product Designer to lead and manage designers based in South East Asia and the UK across our e-commerce and subscriptions product area. The team consists of 3 designers - from Mid-weight to Senior level - working across registration, conversions, purchase flows, subscription management and help centre on app and web. You will partner with peers in engineering, product management and marketing to raise the bar of design, experience and product thinking in teams that are re-imagining and optimising crucial steps in our subscription funnel to drive new acquisitions and retain subscribers. 

Your role will be to connect product and business strategy with the product teams across the e-commerce and subscriptions area. This will be through producing end-to-end impactful designs for strategically important initiatives as well as managing and motivating designers to deliver outstanding work. This role combines individual contributor and managerial responsibilities. A typical day may range from helping to plan the approach, methods and workload of your team; pushing design craft by leading initiatives or pairing with designers on impactful projects—coaching through the work; to building trusted cross functional relationships and providing developmental support to your reports. 

You’ll be able to demonstrate experience designing for subscription business models across app and web, running workshops, working from discovery through to delivery and driving high quality design work within teams. 

You’ll be supported by a friendly and inclusive design team who have the autonomy to define and improve processes and care deeply about developing each other's capabilities. As a senior member of the team you will work closely with other design leads and the VP of Product Design to grow the team, shape our practices and foster our culture.

Responsibilities

• Work with key partners across the business (from product, engineering, editorial, marketing and data) to achieve shared goals. 
• Champion research across teams; planning, managing and running user research alongside your team to understand user behaviour and identify needs. 
• Build a vision for your product area, be an important part of roadmap planning and help to set the strategy for how your designers deliver it. 
• Be the design representative for strategically key initiatives—holding the bar for The Economist brand digitally—ensuring that quality experiences get into the hands of subscribers. 
• Create artefacts like sketches, user flows or interactive prototypes to test assumptions and ideas. You will create production ready design assets and work with engineers to ensure a high quality experience is shipped. 
• Facilitate workshops and/or design sprints that bring stakeholders and others along the product development journey. 
• Communicate progress and product rationale to key partners including the C-suite, by designing and delivering presentations; or through dialogue on an ad-hoc basis. 
• Grow and mentor your reports - helping to shape their career paths and raise the bar of design, experience and product thinking. 
• Contribute and evolve the design culture within the design team. 

Who you are

• You have a strong portfolio that demonstrates your most significant team and personal accomplishments. It will highlight your design process and core craft skills including interaction and visual design across a breadth of platforms and project types. 
• Experience leading teams to deliver many launched products by working collaboratively with product managers, engineers, stakeholders and users in an agile way. 
• You can move between focusing on the minute details of a project to the overarching strategic vision, communicating and reacting to required trade-offs and helping your team plan accordingly. 
• An understanding of technologies used to build world-class digital product experiences. You have experience in agile working and sprints, will be hands-on with user-acceptance testing (UAT) and have a familiarity with the fundamentals of accessibility and usability. 
• Experience in responsive design across multiple screen sizes and devices; with a well-trained eye for design quality, usability and consistency.
• Experience with prototyping and design tools like Miro, Figma or Protopie and can prioritise choosing the right tool at the right time. Experience in AI enabled prototyping tools would be a plus. 
• Experience working with subscription business models. 
• Experience in managing and leading a small team of product designers.
• You have great communication skills and fluency in English. 

If you think you are qualified for this role but don’t necessarily tick every box, please submit an application. The ‘perfect candidate’ doesn’t exist.

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