Founding Lead Product Designer

Healf; Greater London; On-site; GBP 50,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

Healf, Europe's fastest-growing wellbeing brand, is seeking a Product Designer to define the user experience of Wellbeing Intelligence. In this role, you will create a cohesive design system, conduct user research to inform product development, and build a culture of design. Ideal candidates should have a passion for user-centered design, experience in a startup environment, and the conviction to shape the next chapter of health tech. Join us in redefining wellbeing for millions.

Qualifications

• Experience leading product design from first principles.
• A proven record of changing product direction based on user needs.
• Ability to create coherent and distinctive design languages.

Responsibilities

• Define and build the product experience based on user needs.
• Create a design system and establish design language.
• Conduct impactful user research that influences product decisions.

Skills

Strong opinions about user needs

Ability to define problems

Experience in cross-functional teams

User research skills

Design system experience

Job description

The one who defines the product, not just the pixels.

Why this role is Healf

Healf is Europe's fastest-growing company.

Number one on the FT1000, number one on the Sifted 100.

From £1m to over £100m in under three years, with a small, talent-dense team and an electric culture with day one founder intensity. Now we’re aiming for £1bn in the next three.

We curate the world’s best wellbeing brands across The Four Pillars™: EAT, MOVE, MIND, SLEEP. That’s the first chapter.

The next chapter is harder and more interesting. We are moving from one market to many, from e-commerce to a technology platform, and from curating wellbeing to defining it. We are a health company, so we think we should act like one.

At its fullest expression, Healf redefines what wellbeing means for tens of millions of people.

What youourthown

What you will own

• The product, from first principles. You will define what Wellbeing Intelligence looks and feels like as a lived experience. The mobile app. The core surfaces. The information architecture. The emotional register. Not by inheriting a brief, but by thinking from the user’s life inward. What does it feel like to be someone who wants to be well and doesn’t know where to start? Start there. Research it. Frame it. Design it. Defend it.
• The design system, from scratch. Components, patterns, standards. You will build the foundation that every designer and engineer after you builds on. Decisions made in the first six months will hold at ten times the scale. Overbuild for a future that hasn’t arrived yet and you slow the company down. Underbuild and you create chaos. Get it right.
• The language and culture of design at Healf. How does Healf feel as a digital experience? Clinical or warm? Minimal or rich? Expert or approachable? You will define the product language and defend it. You are building the design function. Every decision you make — the tools, the rituals, the relationship with engineering, how research happens, how feedback flows — becomes precedent. You are not joining a design culture. You are creating one.
• A clear, opinionated product direction. You will have a view on what we build next. You will bring it to the table with evidence and argue for it. If you’ve only ever executed other people’s roadmaps, this is not the role for you.

What you'll deliver in the first 12 months

• A design language for Wellbeing Intelligence that is distinctive, coherent, and earns trust with users
• A working design system that engineers build with and future designers will build on
• User research that has actually changed what we built, not just validated what we had already decided
• Users who describe the product experience in emotional terms, not functional ones
• A clear, opinionated point of view on what the product should become next, backed by evidence from real usage
• A design function that other people want to join

You define problems, not just solutions. When handed a brief, your first instinct is to question whether it’s the right brief. You have strong opinions about what the user actually needs and the conviction to say so before a pixel is drawn.

You have been the first. Maybe the first hire. Maybe a founder. Maybe the person at an early-stage company whose design decisions determined whether the product survived. You know what it feels like when there is no design system, no established patterns, no one to validate your decisions. You prefer it that way.

You think in systems but you obsess over moments. The system creates consistency. The moments create feeling. An empty state that turns confusion into curiosity. An onboarding flow that makes someone feel understood before they’ve said a word. A notification that lands at the right moment and feels helpful rather than intrusive. These are not afterthoughts. They are the product.

You have cross-functional depth. You have stayed through build. You have caught production drift. You have pushed back when the implementation missed the intent, and you have been in the room when engineering had to make a hard call. You understand the constraints without hiding behind them.

You have strong opinions and you defend them without being precious. You push back on engineering when implementation drifts. You push back on product when the brief is wrong. You push back on yourself when the first version isn’t good enough.

You are ambitious. Not about titles. About the work. You want to look back at this chapter and know that what you built changed how people think about their health.

Show us

• A product you led end-to-end where you can show the thinking, not just the screens. The problem framing, the decisions, the tradeoffs, the result, and what you would do differently.
• Evidence you have worked at the zero-to-one stage: no design system, no established patterns, everything to define. What did you build and what did you decide?
• A moment where your design changed what the company built, not just how it looked. Where you named a problem no one else had named and drove the solution.
• Something that shows how you work with engineers. Not just hand-off artefacts. Evidence of real collaboration: the back-and-forth, the decisions made in implementation, the things that only became clear in code.
• A point of view on what great health product design looks like and where most of it falls short. We want to see taste and opinion, not just craft.

The deal

We ask a great deal of the people who work here. We expect full ownership and a genuine commitment to give this chapter everything you have.

In return, we will give you the same: everything we have, invested in your growth, your wellbeing, and the defining skills of the next decade.

We have built the fastest-growing company in Europe with a team small enough that every person in it shapes the outcome. That is still true today.

The next person we hire will change the trajectory of the company. If the most important work of your career is ahead of you, this is the place to do it.

Send your CV, a link to your work, and your thoughts on this:

How can the Healf app provide value to customers that they can’t get elsewhere today?

We want to see how you frame problems, not just how you solve them.