Group Product Design Manager

FreeAgent 🚀

FreeAgent aims to remove the stress and pain of dealing with business finances. From the very beginning in 2007, our aim was to create a product that would make an impact and improve the lives of micro-businesses in the UK. Now FreeAgent is one of the UK's most popular online accounting software providers, with over 150,000 customers.

Not to blow our own horn … but AccountingWEB even named FreeAgent the top bookkeeping product of 2020 and 2021. And in 2022 we were voted ‘Friendliest Software of the Year’ at the ICB LUCA Awards. The list could go on!

It’s not just our customers who love us, our employees do too ⭐

Find out more on Glassdoor.

We believe in the power of a collaborative, high-performing, and diverse team. We’d love you to join us on our journey.

The role 👩‍🚀

As a Group Product Design Manager,you will lead one of our groups, focusing on either our Engagement and Banking propositions or our Accountancy and Growth propositions. Working closely with your product, design, and engineering counterparts, you will support the development of innovative and elegant solutions, ensuring we deliver a product that is loved by users and successfully meets our business objectives.

You will manage up to 4 product designers across your group. You will seek to empower your direct reports ensuring they operate at the top of their game. As a manager, you will provide clear design direction so your direct reports feel motivated, productive, and engaged in their work. You will also support them and help them to develop their careers at FreeAgent ensuring we retain and nurture talent.

Working with design leadership, you will facilitate effective and frequent collaboration across teams, ensuring the user experience is consistent across all touch points. You will communicate progress, issues, and constraints clearly and promptly, and look for solutions ensuring product teams feel supported and are set up for success. You will work closely with product, design, and engineering leadership to support the implementation of the product strategy in your group. You will support and guide product designers so they understand, inform, and influence team strategies and select an impactful design approach based on desired strategic outcomes.

Day-to-day, here’s what you can expect:

• You’ll effectively line-manage, support, coach, and mentor your direct reports so they know what’s expected of them and how to progress.
• You’ll support the recruitment and onboarding process for your group.
• You’ll guide each designer to ensure consistency, accessibility, and best practice are at the forefront of all design work.
• You’ll give clear and effective UX and UI design direction and champion our design system.
• You’ll get close to high-impact/high-risk projects and provide effective feedback and design direction where required to ensure work meets the needs of users and the wider organisation.
• You’ll facilitate effective and frequent collaboration across teams to avoid siloed thinking and ensure the user experience is consistent across all touchpoints.
• You’ll support and guide product designers in your group to understand, inform and influence team strategies and how to select an impactful design approach based on desired strategic outcomes.
• You’ll work with internal and external stakeholders to understand requirements and dependencies in order to provide relevant and constructive feedback and direction.
• You’ll work with design leadership to guide the overall design direction of our products.
• You’ll champion the value and role of product design across the wider organisation.
• You’ll help to develop and improve our process and guidelines ensuring teams are set up for success.
• You'll be part of our growing design community, participating in meaningful design discussions, including crits, forums, and drop-ins.
• You’ll work with peers and leadership to make the best space possible for design to happen.

You 🙌

This is a great role for you if:

• you have a track record of designing user interfaces for complex applications and translating user requirements into elegant, usable solutions in a senior role
• you have experience effectively line managing, hiring, and coaching product designers, holding them to a high standard whilst also motivating them to do their best work
• you have experience giving effective and actionable UX and UI design direction
• you value diversity, differing perspectives, and team health, and practice patience and empathy
• you are a confident communicator, both verbally and in writing, and can clearly make your opinion known whilst ensuring the opinions of others are heard and acknowledged
• you're an excellent facilitator and have experience planning, organising, and facilitating effective collaboration with clear outcomes

This is a new role within FreeAgent and will form part of our growing design department which includes Product Design, Comms Design, User Research, and UX Writing.

Front and centre to our work, we strive tirelessly to create the very best experience for our customers. We'll encourage you to be brave, take risks, and fail without fear because we believe in the value of the journey and in learning by making. It’s fast-paced at times, but it’s always fun!

Benefits 🎁

Annual starting salary of £68,000 - £70,000 per annum depending on experience, with room to progress to £78,000 within the band. Our starting salaries typically leave some opportunity for growth within the band as salaries are linked to performance expectations to nurture our culture of fairness, learning and development.

We pride ourselves on creating a fantastic place to work, including (but not limited to!) the following:

• 33 days holiday (and an extra day for each year you're with us)
• Flexible/hybrid working
• Private health care
• Life assurance
• 5% matched pension contributions
• Summer 4 day weeks (giving you 7 additional days off!)
• Buy-as-you-earn share schemes
• Sabbatical leave (unpaid)
• Cycle to work scheme
• Wellness webinars
• Focused learning time and learning budgets
• Volunteering day

Our work life 👩🏽‍💻

We believe in a strong work-life balance, we don’t work long hours (35 hour working week), and we have a fabulous Edinburgh HQ expertly designed for collaboration including high-quality A/V equipment to provide a great experience for distributed teams.

At FreeAgent, we support each other and operate a no-blame culture. Our mindset is: work hard, be nice to people, and the rest will sort itself out!

This is a permanent, full-time role (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm). This role will be based in our Edinburgh office two days per week, with the option to work from home for the remainder of the week. Our Edinburgh office is our bustling hub, helping to support teamwork and collaboration, but working from home is also second nature to us as we have been championing remote working for 16 years.

How to apply ✍

We hire smart, talented people (like you!) to make FreeAgent even better.

Our application process is simple: upload your CV and answer a few questions about why you want to work with us. Please include a link to your portfolio. Try to include case studies that showcase your experience designing user interfaces for complex applications and where applicable, share your experience leading and managing other designers. Check out these 7 portfolio tips which our design team shared on our FreeAgent blog. 👀

Our selection process includes:

• A phone call with a member of our Talent Team
• A video interview
• A final interview, incorporating a presentation element

We work hard to make the process straightforward, transparent, and enjoyable.

FreeAgent is an equal opportunity employer. We strongly encourage applications from people with varied backgrounds and perspectives. All applicants are considered for employment without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, family or parental status.

Want to find out more? Email any queries to [email protected]