Senior Product Designer (FT.com/Apps)

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.

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.

The Role

We’re looking for a Senior Product Designer to join the Product Design team in our London Office. You’ll be working on FT.com and the FT Apps, helping to deliver our world-leading journalism to wider audiences. 

In this role, you’ll be working on the very heart of FT, how people find and consume our journalism. As well as making content discovery better, you’ll help us create new, world class content formats worthy of our much-loved journalism.

You’ll be working alongside a fully empowered squad of engineers, researchers, product managers, with support from and access to relevant stakeholders from around the FT such as editorial, marketing, etc.

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.

Progression at FT

You’ll receive regular guidance and support from your squad, your line manager, our Director of Product design, and of course 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.

We have a transparent, measureable 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.

What you’ll be doing

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. 

• 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

• We welcome applications from people who can demonstrate strong end-to-end product design competencies. You’ll have shipped multiple features and iterations, perhaps across several products. You’ll probably have been a practising product designer for 4+ years

• We’d like to see 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. 

• Experience in media and content is a plus, particularly if you’ve designed customer-facing products.

• A flexible, motivated, experimental and collaborative mindset. The work is fast-paced and you should be comfortable with ambiguity and testing and learning.

• A desire to learn, and hone your craft. You’ll be surrounded by talented designers, product managers, researchers, engineers, etc. We cultivate an environment where everyone shares and learns from each other. It helps us all improve.

• Nice to have: experience designing consumer media products

Package and benefits

Our benefits vary depending on location, but we are committed to providing best in class perks across all our offices as well as an inclusive environment to develop your career. Examples of our benefits include; 

• Holidays & Flexible Working -  Employees receive 25 days holiday annually, extending to 30 after two years. You can organise flexible working arrangements with your line manager.

• Employee Wellbeing -  This service includes a 24-hour professional advice and counselling phone line. Employees can also access up to six face to face counselling sessions.

• FT Pension plan -  The FT will double your pension contributions. You can contribute up to 6% of your salary if you are 44 and under, and up to 8% from aged 45 and over.

• Cycle to work scheme -  This scheme provides employees with a tax-free bike through salary sacrifice.

• Charity matching - If you take part in a sponsored event or raise money for charity, the FT will match donations up to £500 per employee per year.

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.

Further Information

The FT is 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.