Product Designer - FT Specialist

Here at the Financial Times, gold-standard journalism is just the beginning. 500-people strong, our Product and 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.

Learn more about the FT, including announcements and career opportunities, at aboutus.ft.com.

FT Specialist brings together a portfolio of 16 niche digital publications, including ones with more than 160 years of tradition.

• Investors’ Chronicle
• The Banker
• FT Adviser 

Position Summary

We are looking for a Product Designer to join the Product Design team in our Sofia Office.

You’ll be working on MandateWire, a product that helps asset managers win new business. In 2023 we want to make MandateWire more user-centric. We want to deliver intuitive customer journeys and make our valuable data and insight more accessible to our users.

You’ll help deliver end-to-end product experiences, from exploratory research into opportunity definition, from ideation into concepting, from testing into shipping, measuring and iterating.

With support from the user research team, you will plan and run research with customers or target markets, to inform and validate your designs.

You will evolve data visualisations and establish a new design language for MandateWire, contributing to our design system. 

You will work alongside a fully empowered squad of engineers, researchers and product managers, with stakeholders such as editorial, marketing, and sales.

Product Designers at the FT

Week to week, you’ll be:

• Planning and prioritising. You’ll have an equal stake in your squad’s direction. You’ll always be learning, planning and prioritising your areas of focus and approach together.

• Researching and learning about users. Defining and participating in user research and testing, together with Researchers. Digging into data with Analysts, to understand and measure behaviours. Working with editorial to understand content theory and process.

• Analysing products. Conducting competitor and comparator analysis. Reviewing existing journeys and features. you will explore ways of improving and innovating our experience.

• Empathy and experience mapping. Understanding user mindsets, motivations and expectations. Mapping experiences, journeys and flows, to help us unearth and prioritise pain points and opportunities.

• Ideating. Working with your squad to generate and prioritise ideas. Planning and facilitating co-creation sprints and workshops

• Concepting and exploring. Developing loose ideas into concepts. Working with your squad to evolve and prioritise those concepts.

• Testing and learning fast. Using a variety of testing approaches and techniques; card sorting, low and high fidelity prototypes, fake-door tests, multivariate testing, and shipping into the live environment to learn. 

• Measuring and prioritising. Measuring experiments with your squad. Abandoning unsuccessful concepts, and evolving successful ones.

• Influencing the design system. Designing new components, patterns, layouts, flows and interactions which will feed back into our design system and component library. 

• Supported: by your squad, your line manager, the Director of Product design, and the whole Product Design team. We work hard to foster a safe environment where we share and discuss our work proactively, to inspire, support and guide each other.

• Evolving! We strive to continually improve and evolve. Evolving our process by adding new techniques and abandoning obsolete ones. Evolving our product until we achieve objectives, rather than stopping once we’ve shipped.

What we’re looking for from you

• Strong end-to-end product design competencies, particularly UX. You’ll have shipped dozens of features and iterations, perhaps across multiple products. You’ll probably have been a practising product designer for 3+ years

• User-centricity: highly curious and inquisitive about end users and enjoy working with research and data to validate design and interactions

• Ability to capture complexity and use a human-centred approach to simplify the problem and make it understandable

• Comfortable running workshops or leading remote collaboration sessions with cross-functional groups

• A portfolio which helps us understand your Product Design approach and experience. Ideally the portfolio would tell us about the approach you took and what you learned, rather than only showcasing final designs

• A desire to learn, and hone your craft. You’ll be surrounded by talented colleagues. We cultivate an environment where everyone shares and learns from each other

• Experience working on data or content-heavy subscription products would be a bonus

• Experience working with design systems would be a bonus

In Return, We Can Offer You

• Annual bonus scheme

• 25 days paid leave

• 24/7 Employee Assistance Program

• Life Insurance 

• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave policy

• Food Allowance

• Multisport Card

• Both in house and external training programs

• Your own training dedicated budget (for conferences, courses etc.)

Career progression and growth

The Product Design Team has a transparent, measurable progression framework, which outlines all of the skills FT Product Designers need, and details how to progress in each skill category. We use this as a basis for your biannual reviews, where you’ll self assess against the progression framework, track progression, and agree 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 a variety of ways in which you can progress your career with us, some of which are highlighted below: 

• 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.

Anything else?

Don’t forget to send over your CV!

The Financial Times Ltd. committed to equality of opportunity. We are determined to create a diverse group at all levels of our Company and we welcome all members of the community we serve to apply for openings with us.