Principal product designer

Principal Product Designer

Location: Remote UK

Contract: Permanent

Hours: 37.5 hours (Core hours 10:00am - 2:00pm Monday - Friday)

We're here to help those who teach. It's what brings us to work every day. At Twinkl, we’ve been providing educators across the world with high quality, trusted teaching and learning resources for over a decade now. They’re all written and checked by our wonderful team of experienced educators, and there are hundreds of thousands of resources to download, with new ones added daily.

The product team is dedicated to creating innovative and engaging experiences for educators and children. We are committed to enriching the lives of users through our website which enables teachers and schools to access millions of downloadable resources, and interactive and educational applications that inspire creativity, learning, and fun. We’re looking for an experienced Principal Product Designer to lead the end-to-end design experience, champion strategic design challenges, along with the implementation, and governance of a design system, which will be used to elevate quality, aesthetic appeal and consistency across all channels including customer-facing and B2B products.

Ongoing projects/how you’ll spend your day:

• Design leadership & design system development: Set the standard for design, ensuring a cohesive and high-quality user experience across all platforms. Advocate for design across the organisation. Oversee the creation and maintenance of a robust design system that promotes consistency, scalability, and efficiency across all design projects and digital channels

• Customer-centric UX/UI design: Oversee broad end-to-end design challenges across channels. Create wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs for web and mobile. Design intuitive, accessible, and visually appealing user interfaces that enhance the learning experience. Ensure a seamless user experience by designing clear navigation, interaction flows, and information architecture.

• Leverage customer insights: Collaborate with the UXR and customer insights teams to conduct user research to understand the needs, pain points, and behaviours of educators and students. Translate research findings into actionable design insights and product requirements.

• Design exploration: Coordinate and lead appropriate forums for the purpose of ideation and exploring design solutions with a cross-functional team, including stakeholders (you will have an extensive toolkit of methodologies to enable this)

• Cross-functional collaboration: Collaborating with engineering, product, UXR, data and education teams to ensure the successful development and launch of products.

• Stakeholder management: Building strong relationships with stakeholders, effectively communicating your designs and managing and incorporating their feedback from stakeholders at various levels

• Support the end-to-end product development process: From product conception and ideation through to implementation, pre-launch testing and final customer feedback (circling back into iterative product design) you will be engaged and contributing every step of the way to ensure a successful launch of high quality products

• Mentoring: Using your extensive experience you will mentor more junior team members and advocate for design across the organisation, promoting best practice and ways of working

To succeed in the role, you will:

• Be User-Centric: Have a deep empathy for users and a strong commitment to creating solutions that meet their needs and enhance their experience.
• Demonstrate Strong Leadership: Possess the ability to lead and inspire a team of designers, driving projects forward and maintaining a high standard of design excellence.
• Communicate Effectively & Collaboratively: Excel in communicating complex design ideas clearly and persuasively to a variety of audiences, including technical and non-technical stakeholders. Thrive in a team environment, working effectively with cross-functional teams to achieve common goals.
• Manage Projects Efficiently: Handle multiple projects simultaneously, managing time and resources effectively to meet deadlines and deliver high-quality results.
• Be Detail-Oriented: Have a keen eye for detail, ensuring the highest quality in design deliverables and user experiences.
• Be Adaptable & have a growth mindset: Thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment, and be able to adapt to changing priorities and new challenges, open to learning and responsive to feedback.

We're interested in people that have:

• Bachelor’s degree in Design, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related field.
• At least 8 years of experience in product design focused on user-centred design projects across web and apps - preferably education technology or related industry.
• Proficiency in design tools such as Sketch, Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, or similar.
• Strong portfolio showcasing your design process, user research, and final designs.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills.
• Experience implementing accessibility standards and best practices.
• An understanding of the EdTech landscape, gamification, and emerging technologies such as AI is a plus

If you require a reasonable adjustment to the application/selection process to enable you to demonstrate your ability to perform the job requirements please include this at the foot of your covering letter. This will help us to understand any modifications we may need to make to support you throughout our selection process.

Benefits:

• In return for everything you can bring, we can offer you an exciting role in a fast-growing and dynamic business, with plenty of career opportunities.
• A friendly, welcoming and supportive culture. We believe work should be fun and always put people before the process
• Diversity, inclusion and belonging - our Employee Network Program includes working groups for LGBTQ+, People of Colour, Disabilities (visible and invisible), Women in Tech and Working Parents.
• From day 1 - Westfield Health, 33 annual leave days per year (pro-rata) inclusive bank holidays, a \"Me\" day each year, a charity day each year, flexible working policy with opportunities to work from home and Twinkl subscriptions.
• Quarterly company awards programme
• Seasonal events
• Referral scheme
• Company sick pay after 3 months of service
• After probation - cycle-to-work scheme
• Long-term service reward - Life insurance, enhanced pension contribution, enhanced maternity pay, enhanced adoption pay and enhanced paternity pay, long service award, long service annual leave