Lead Product Designer

Trainline is an innovative, tech business with a mission to bring together the world’s rail, coach and other travel services into one simple experience. We aim to make travel easier and more accessible, encouraging people to make more environmentally sustainable travel choices. We’re hugely proud to be the world’s leading independent rail and coach travel platform and rank among the highest-rated travel and ticketing apps globally. Today, we offer our customers travel to thousands of destinations in and across 45 countries in Europe and beyond. That’s more than £3.7 billion in ticket sales annually, and over 90 million visits to our apps and websites each month. In another major milestone, Trainline listed on the London Stock Exchange in June 2019 and is now part of the FTSE 250.

Our culture is central to our success. We’re driven to sustain our phenomenal growth from recent years, and this means we’re always working closely and collaboratively to turn our ideas into reality. It’s this sense of pace, innovating and improving pretty much everything we do, that makes Trainline so exciting and unique - we truly believe our work has a genuine impact and will change travel for the better.

Purpose of the Role   

The consumption of rail travel is at a ‘once in a generation’ moment of inflexion due to the change in consumer behaviour the global pandemic has brought. We see the future of ticketing innovation as one of the most exciting initiatives influencing this, and we’re working in partnership with government departments globally to bring data to the forefront of this development alongside new payment solutions and technology collaborations…and that’s where you come in. 

As Lead Product Designer, your challenge will be to pave the vision for digital mobile ticketing and turn it into reality, validating new disruptive ideas and shipping iterations to transform the industry. You’ll be at the forefront of this brave new world, and it will be your responsibility to develop a thorough understanding of the customer to build next-generation products that will drive this mass behaviour change for rail passengers. 

We’re proud of the innovation around ticketing we’ve driven. Our e-ticket product has been a game-changer within the rail industry, and we now account for over 70% of all digital tickets sold in the UK. As a key contributor to our future business growth, you’ll be laser focused on using rich insights and deep qual and quant data to understand the opportunities that technology and future digital innovation can bring to enhancing our proposition. 

Probably most exciting of all are multiple scopes and dimensions this innovation can, and will, deliver for the business and wider industry. On one hand, there are a wealth of possibilities that contactless and NFC technologies can generate within the UK and international markets. However, embedding this technology into our app will unleash untapped potential in the commuter market which has returned to growth, post-Covid. 

We ship new products at speed and employ a ‘build/test/learn’ mentality around our product development. To this end, success lies in your customer-centric mindset, your ability to challenge thinking and provoke debateacross multiple teams, and your vision in seeing the bigger picture of what the business as a whole is trying to achieve and how your initiatives fit. This is a truly career-defining role for someone passionate about product design looking for an opportunity to disrupt and define a product that is changing the way we travel and inspiring millions people all over the world to make more environmentally sustainable travel choices every day. 

Knowledge & Experience 

We’re looking for creative big thinkers with low egos to achieve our ambitious plans. Most importantly, you’ll bring exceptional delivery within your 6+ years of design experience within a fast-paced consumer-focused tech or online business, and will possess a passion for the speed that comes with working in an innovative, growth environment. You’ll be someone with deep understanding of the full UX process, and pixel perfect sensitivity in tying in with our vision for this product. Similarly, you’ll be used to running usability testing sessions and defining how the outputs can be carried into design processes. 

Outstanding communication and storytelling are critical in this role as you convey concepts and ideas to stakeholders at all levels in different shapes depending on the context. Your excellent leadership and relationship skills go without saying, and you’ll be used to mentoring or managing other junior designers bringing an empowering way of working. Oozing creativity and a beacon of inspiration and design excellence in the team, you’ll understand that Product teams fail as many times as they succeed albeit you’re capable of understanding why, and will bring an action orientated, hands-on approach to solving creative challenges.  

Validating ideas with data and customer research will come as second nature to you, and understand that success is positively impacting customer behaviour, not just about shipping a release. You’ll bring experience designing digital products and systems, not just apps. Additionally, you will be a true self-starter who can deeply collaborate with Engineers and Product Owners. We use Figma here day-to-day, so a working knowledge of this is ideal.

- 25 days holiday +2 extra days at Christmas

- Free private medical and dental insurance for you and your family (you just pay the tax on what you choose!)

- Life assurance & income protection

- Good pension scheme

- Season Ticket loan

- Charity leave

- Enhanced primary caregiver leave

- Free breakfast everyday and fruit galore!

- Yoga Mondays

- Board Game nights

 ....and many more