Product Designer (Design Systems)

About Us

Here at the FT, gold-standard journalism is just the beginning. 500-people strong, our Product & Tech team keeps us ahead of the ever-changing digital landscape by delivering cutting-edge products to over one million digital subscribers every day. Our plans for growth rely on a diverse, dedicated and dynamic group of product, tech, delivery and data specialists - everyone’s welcome in this friendly, forward-thinking team. And with entrepreneurial spirit, intelligence and opportunity at every turn, there’s no limits to where your FT career will take you.

The Role

At the Financial Times, we're united by a mission to deliver world-class information, news and services to a discerning global audience.

Calling all Design System aficionados. This is a wonderful opportunity joining the Origami team to develop the FT's Origami Design system, which currently supports our flagship products - the ft.com website and app - for almost a decade. It's a high-quality and valued part of our product teams' workflow.

We’re looking for someone who enjoys developing Design Systems as this is a key role for the team. Our goal is to extend the reusability of the design system (Think Multi-brand system), so we're expanding the team to become cross-functional and 'make good things happen' more often. This will involve using your entire range of interaction, prototyping and visual skills to create a wonderfully consistent look and feel across our portfolio of digital products across mobile and web. 

As an experienced systems designer, you will have a track record of developing design systems which have delivered successful business and user satisfaction outcomes. As well as interaction design skills, strong collaboration with engineers is required to provide high-quality solutions. Also valuable is fostering partnerships with stakeholders and supporting their needs in applying the system around product constraints.

Responsibilities as Design Systems Designer at FT 

• Building the thing right! Create a unified, cohesive set of design system elements and components for the design system which follow accessibility standards
• Analysing. Understand our current landscape through an audit of the different design systems that we have, and our components. Working with research and data to validate design and interactions
• Ideation and testing. Exploration of divergent concepts whilst understanding how to converge and build towards the design systems vision. Test and implement modern interactions and patterns to deliver a premium experience for our subscribers
• Planning and prioritisation. Contribute and drive strategic planning to define the future of the design system with engineering and product teams 
• Prototyping. Creating high-quality mockups and interactive prototypes to communicate your work
• Advocacy and governance. Be an advocate of bringing new ideas to the entire team and internal partners. Drive and communicate processes and governance of the design system
• Relationships and collaboration.  Build partnerships with key product teams and stakeholders. Be a design advocate by sharing and presenting cross-functionally. 
• Evolving! We strive to continually improve and evolve. Evolving our process by adding new techniques and abandoning obsolete ones. 

What we're looking for from you

• You like to help people, collaborate and share ideas
• Experience  working in Product Design and UX
• Experience working on design systems
• A portfolio demonstrating UX and Design systems experience
• Proficient with current design and prototyping tools (Figma, etc)
• Highly curious and inquisitive about end users and the needs of cross-functional product teams 
• Able to engage with stakeholders around your work
• Visual design and brand  craft
• Ability to work with a low-ego, highly collaborative, cross-functional team

Nice to have but Non-essential

• Experience designing on platforms (Web, iOS, Android, etc)
• Multi-brand design system experience 
• Accessibility – experience building and testing on the web with assistive technologies

Career Progression

The Product Design team has a transparent, measurable progression framework. We use this as a basis for your biannual reviews, where you'll self-assess against the progression framework, track progression, and agree on areas of focus with your line manager. 

We invest in our people to allow them to grow both personally and professionally whilst working at The FT. We offer: 

• Career coaching - Career coaching is time spent focused on you and how you can achieve your career aspirations. 
• Mentoring programme - The mentoring programme aims to connect people across the business to support professional and personal growth through knowledge sharing and guidance.
• Learning and development - The FT offers a host of learning and development opportunities that will not only help you build the skills you need to grow in your profession or field, but will also help you improve your own personal development, with courses such as self-coaching, productivity, presentation confidence, research techniques and much more.

Our commitment to diversity and inclusion in the workplace

At the FT, we aim for employees across all regions to have a voice so that diverse perspectives are heard and valued. We believe that a supportive workplace is one where employees feel they can be themselves at work and have the flexibility they need to meet their personal needs. We'll continue to remove barriers for all, and in particular barriers facing employees from underrepresented groups.

Benefits

• 25 days of leave, increasing to 30 after two years. We also offer additional flexi-days at 30% pay.
• Pension plan, the company will double your contribution up to 18% total
• Free gym membership via GymPass, or subsidised access to Nuffield Health
• Enhanced maternity & paternity packages
• Other schemes include: childcare vouchers, give as you earn, cycle to work, travel loans, healthcare, dental, life assurance
• Full details of our benefits can be found here.

How we work

We offer a strict 35 hour working week to all staff in our London office. Our hybrid setup means staff are expected to come into the office 2 days a week on average. We operate flexibly and thus this 2 day a week figure should be taken as a general ratio of the time you will spend in the office.

Our office is located across the street from St. Paul's Cathedral and is easily accessible from all corners of London. There are the main train terminals such as Liverpool Street, Moorgate, Blackfriars, City Thameslink or Waterloo all situated within walking distance or there are several tube stations within a few mins walk such as Mansion House (District or Circle line), St. Paul's (Central line), Bank (Central or Waterloo & City line) or Barbican (Central, Hammersmith & City or Metropolitan lines).

Further Information

The FT are committed to providing an inclusive working environment for all. We are an equal opportunities employer who seeks to recruit and appoint the best talent regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We also promote flexible working and will consider specific requests around flexibility for all roles where it can be accommodated. Please let us know if you require any adjustments as part of the application process or to enable you to attend an interview. If you would like to discuss your requirements, or have any questions, please contact a member of our HR team who will be happy to help.