Head of Product Design

At Storio, we Make Joy Unforgettable. The Design team is responsible for ensuring that our digital experience, across all devices, is both usable and desirable, enabling customers to create high-quality, personalised photo products. This team plays a key role in fostering a customer-focused approach within the organisation.

The Head of Product Design plays a critical leadership role in driving excellence across our product design practice, ensuring it's grounded in established best practices with a commitment to continuous improvement. You will be equally accountable for the direct line management, coaching, and career development of our Product Designers (6, including Senior and Midweight levels), and for driving continuous improvement in our overall Product Design practice and maturity. You will lead efforts to drive continuous improvement in the Product Design practice, fostering effective collaboration with Product, Engineering, and UXR practices, and empowering your team to contribute to these efforts.

Key colleague collaborations for this role are the Head of UX Research, Head of Product and Engineering Principals. Working together, you’ll collaborate to define and embed best practices for the entire Product and Tech team. This role reports directly to the Director of Product in the Customer Experience domain, which contains all of our customer facing experience Product teams across web, mobile app and desktop app.

This role is ideal for a design leader passionate about fostering team growth, design process, discovery process, design systems, and defining standards and accessibility. A key goal for this role will be to further define how P&T approaches the discovery process in collaboration with the Head of UX Research and Head of Product, embedding best practices within your design team and the broader Product and Tech group.

People Leadership & Development: You'll be responsible for the direct line management, coaching, and career development of our 6 Product Designers (Senior and Midweight). This includes fostering a high-performing, inclusive, and psychologically safe team culture that champions excellence, creativity, innovation, and continuous improvement, while overseeing performance and leading talent acquisition and retention for the design organization.

Product Design Practice and Operations: Lead meeting cadences, standardise ways of working, ensure effective design crits and maintain optimal design tooling contracts (such as Figma). Guide your team through quarterly product planning, taking the lead to ensure design capacity is appropriately sized and planned across all product teams.

Define Key Design Documentation: In collaboration with the Head of UX Research and Head of Product, lead the definition and implementation of a scalable approach to mapping key customer journeys in order to make customer and commercial risks and opportunities highly visible. Define and maintain insight-informed design principles that guide the customer-centric decision-making of the Product team, and ensure their consistent application by your team.

Co-Own the Design System: In collaboration with Engineering Principals, co-own and champion the adoption of the design system, ensuring it is scalable, maintainable, represents best practices, and is used appropriately by product teams and your design team. Own the relationship with the Brand team to ensure that the visual identity is appropriate for in-journey use, and that the design system stays aligned.

Lead & Evolve the Product Discovery Process: Collaborate with the Head of Product and Head of UX Research to define and evolve the Product Discovery framework for the design team. You'll ensure consistent, effective discovery practices across all product designers, guiding them to identify opportunities and translate insights into actionable solutions.

Accessibility: Own the timeline and approach to meeting WCAG AA standards, driving and overseeing the Product Design team's adoption and ensuring designers have the training and support needed to meet these benchmarks. Champion inclusive design methods to deeply understand the needs of all customers and optimise the usability of their experience.

Provide thought leadership: Stay ahead of industry trends, tools, and methodologies to introduce innovative solutions that enhance customer experience, and actively guide your team in doing so. Share findings and best practices and advocate for design-led solutions and user centricity at all levels of the organisation.

Collaborate with UX research: Collaborate closely with UX Research to embed best practice usability testing and assessment methods in the Product Design team, ensuring that Product Designers consistently include usability testing and insight in their design decisions. You'll also lead efforts to upskill Product Designers in foundational UX research techniques, enabling them to conduct lightweight, iterative research and better inform their own design decisions.

Outcome Measurement: Measure progress towards internal adoption of process, tools and standards. Define ways to track the adoption and success of best practice approaches, regularly reporting on these outcomes through the Product & Tech Quarterly Business Review.

Proven People Leadership Experience: Direct line management experience specifically managing Product Designers, including performance management, career development, coaching, mentoring and team building.

Extensive Design Leadership Experience: A large amount of progressive product design experience, with a significant portion spent at a senior leadership level, demonstrating experience in managing and optimizing design across multiple devices (web, mobile app, desktop app).

Deep Expertise in Defining and Embedding Design Process: Proven track record of defining, implementing, and iterating on product design processes and frameworks, and scaling these across a team.

Leading Discovery Methods and Processes: Proven experience facilitating and guiding teams in discovery methods and processes, e.g., problem framing, impact mapping, assumption mapping early-stage prototyping, collaborative decision making, and specific methodologies such as design sprints.

Setting up or Managing a Design System: Experience with either setting up, managing, or significantly evolving a design system, and ensuring its adoption and maintenance by a design team.

Designing Accessible User Journeys: Demonstrable experience designing accessible user journeys, flows, interactions, and interfaces to WCAG AA standards, and ensuring team adherence to these standards.

Excellent Communication and Storytelling Skills: Ability to articulate complex design challenges and opportunities to diverse audiences, empowering and developing your team to do the same.

Strategic Collaboration: Experience of collaborating successfully and leading initiatives with Product Management, Engineering, and UX Research in an agile environment, informing and shaping the overall Product strategy and roadmap.

Design Capacity Management & Prioritisation: Proven experience prioritising design tasks, managing design capacity across multiple product teams, and assessing work based on risk, impact, and business goals.

Outcome Measurement: Experience defining and delivering on design success measures and metrics, and establishing ways to track the adoption and impact of design practices.

Demonstrable Understanding of Service Design: Experience applying principles and methodologies to improve end-to-end customer journeys.

Experience in a B2C ecommerce environment.

Experience working with both physical and digital products, including an understanding of their integrated user experiences.

Using Jira for planning and task management