Product Design Principal Full Time

11:FS Group
What will you be doing here?

In short, you’ll be helping to direct a talented design team through exciting projects that push people out of their comfort zone, growing better product designers and delivering award winning work.

With support from business leadership, you will be:

• Guiding new fintech propositions from ideation through to launch, creating strong partnerships with client sponsors, earning complete trust in your design guidance
• Be the primary expert in fast-paced, iterative design – drawing on your impressive design eye and sixth sense for simple UX patterns
• Be relied upon to lead teams of designers, thinkers, researchers and makers from all walks of life who are at the top of their game
• Amplifying your voice as a designer. You will be expected to develop an external profile as one of the key design faces within the company. Contributing articles and appearing on youtube shows or global podcasts – clients should want to come and work with YOU.
• As one of the most senior people in our ventures business you will work closely with our VP Design to continue to evolve how we make design success repeatable, develop individuals, make the right hires, create the right culture, and play nicely with other teams.
• Contribute to our streamlined business development process. We don’t do pointless pitch theatre – instead your role is to bring trustworthy, credible expertise to client conversations and feeding into scoping discussions to make sure we accurately estimate projects.

What will you – not – be doing here?

• You won’t be working on one thing for years on end
• You won’t be just working on the meaningless details as a small cog in a big corporate machine
• You won’t be waiting for permission before trying anything out – just go for it

What do we like? Flair

Greater automation results in greater conformity – you’ve got to bring the memorably weird bits. You embrace a blank page and have the conceptual and visual ability to draw on the patterns you already know, but add that something special that makes people say ‘damn, that’s slick’.

Empathetic leadership

At this level you’ve learnt how to get the best out of different personalities. You’re able to create a mutual trust where it’s ok to fail and it’s ok for people to bring their true selves to work. You recognise there can be more than one correct answer and micro-management ain’t your bag.

Confident storytelling

You tell an incredible story around any piece of work – it doesn’t just look good, but you can explain why it’s been created that way, to anyone who needs to hear it – from breakfast buffet to boardroom. And hopefully make them laugh along the way.

Problem solving

Any product designer worth their salt can make a clean UI, but we’re after exceptional thinkers who can make sense of the complicated and crucially can organise and prioritise those thoughts. Guiding teams to translate that into solutions, flows and layouts that people instantly find familiar and usable.

Drive

We’re not talking about motivation here, that should be a given. All of our people at all levels are free to own their project work and think creatively, but you should be able to initiate and drive through ideas that improve how we work. You need to care about the quality of all of our work and the impact it will have on the lives of the people you’re creating it for.

What experience are we looking for?

With at least 10 years start-up, agency, studio, or in-house experience, you:

• Have defined and iterated the design process end-to-end, always optimising, while being a vocal advocate for design within the company
• You bring not only an innate understanding ofUI patterns, but consistently demonstrate how to create memorable interactions – despite design trends driving towards less originality.
• YourUX knowledge is second to none and you are able to join up discreet parts of a customer experience and map it across user flows, sketches and prototypes
• You have always put things into the hands of customers quickly and often, defining how teams use customer feedback to iterate a product or idea
• You can demonstrate a deep understanding of the relationship betweenbrand and product. You know when to create lovable moments of serendipity, or when to simply rely on consistency
• You are a master of design ops. You have likely designed and owned adesign system, you know how to manage component updates across a team and have a strong opinion on how a product can scale effectively with design and development completely aligned.
• You are a master of ideation sprints and can own a room. You’ve dealt with every curveball, iterated the process during the lunch break, subtly steered big egos away from bad ideas. You can pull a workshop out of nowhere and can get from customer insight to concept with no pointless tasks.
• You are a genuine T-shape and have built an understanding of how design intersects with adjacent disciplines including product management, engineering and customer research

Do I need financial services experience?

It’s definitely a real bonus, but not 100% essential. We are making his hire for the long term and the right candidate will build industry knowledge quickly.

If you arrive here really knowing your design onions, our UX research tool Pulse will give you access to recordings of every fintech interaction you’d ever want to see and provides the bedtime reading to get you up to speed.

Importantly, we are not a bank or a traditional consultancy and the environment is similar to a startup or design studio.

Who will you be working with?

In the last 7 years we have built an amazing team from the best in start-ups, design studios, agencies and financial services. Our people have co-founded and grown challengers like Monzo, Starling, and Tandem, led the technology platforms at Nutmeg, Betfair and beyond.

You will join the design practice, helping to create innovative products for our clients and working with people who’ve been creating the digital FS services you may now own a card from.

Find more about us here: