Lead Product Designer

J Street Group; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working option

£1000 holiday incentive after year

£500 L&D budget

Birthday off

Volunteering days

Transport benefits

Job summary

Street Group is seeking an L6 Lead Product Designer, the most senior IC in design for a domain. You’ll set the direction, define the craft standard, and elevate the experiences across multiple features.

The role balances strategic design leadership with hands-on delivery and mentoring of peers. You’ll insist on strong AI thinking in product design, shaping when AI adds real value and avoiding gimmicks, while collaborating closely with product and engineering teams.

Qualifications

• Experience at senior IC level in modern product org.
• Ability to define design direction and drive outcomes.
• Strong understanding of AI in product design.
• Comfortable working with product and engineering peers.

Responsibilities

• Own the design vision and execution for a product domain.
• Set the craft bar through your output and influence across teams.
• Lead cross-cutting design problems across features and surfaces.
• Mentor designers and raise the bar through critique and pairing.
• Drive AI thinking strategically in workflow and product shipping.

Skills

Senior IC

Product design

AI in product

Cross-functional

Job description

Street Group is one of the fastest-growing PropTech companies in the UK. We want to be the leading creator of delightful experiences for everybody involved in buying, selling, renting and letting property, regardless of their involvement, to improve the industry for everybody by elevating UK Estate Agencies through world-class technology.

We're now looking for a Lead Product Designer - the most senior individual contributor for design within a product domain. This is predominantly an IC role: you'll set the design bar for an entire domain through the quality of your own work, the patterns you contribute, and the way you raise the designers around you. We're flexible on this for the right person, if you've got management experience, or want to line-manage one or two designers alongside the IC work, let's talk.

We want someone who is tired of the “feature factory” grind, who is past needing to be told what's worth working on, and who is ready to set the design direction for a domain in one of the most exciting PropTech companies in the UK.

If you look at most UX job ads, you see a laundry list of requirements. We prefer to tell you how we actually operate so you can decide if this is the right environment for you.

• At Street Group, design is a strategic seat. Lead Product Designers drive roadmap conversations alongside their product and engineering counterparts, not respond to them.
• Our users rely on us to run their businesses, so they love talking to us. You can spin up a call and validate a prototype instantly. We don't guess; we ask.
• We move at pace, including on strategic work. Strategy isn't a separate, slower track here - we test it by shipping.

Here's what you can expect to be working on as an L6 Lead Product Designer at Street Group

• Own the design vision and execution for a product domain. Translate strategic direction into the most ambiguous, cross-cutting, or strategically important pieces of design work.
• Set the craft bar through your own output. The work you ship is the reference point for what good looks like in your area.
• Own the cross-cutting design problems: patterns across multiple features, flows across multiple surfaces, the coherence of the domain's experience as a whole.
• Mentor and raise the bar of the designers around you - through critique, pairing, and modelling what excellent design looks like.
• Drive AI thinking strategically - both in your own workflow (Claude Code, in-product changes, prototype testing) and in what we ship to users. You'll have a strong view on what makes a good AI feature in this domain vs a gimmicky one.

Why you should (and shouldn't) apply

You should apply if:

• You've operated at senior IC level in a modern product org and you want broader scope to influence what gets built.
• You're commercially fluent. You've made design trade-offs informed by how the product makes money, not just by user preference. You can name those trade-offs and defend them either way.
• You define what success looks like before you ship, and you read the result against it after. Metrics, support data, customer feedback - you go and look.
• You have strong, well-formed views on AI in product design and have put them into practice. You can articulate when AI is the right design solution and when it isn't.
• You move at pace on strategic work, not just on features.

You probably shouldn't apply if:

• You're looking for the next pay band up from Senior with broadly similar expectations. This is not a “Senior+” role. Lead expects materially more scope, autonomy, judgment, and ownership of outcomes.
• You've never shipped design work where you defined a success measure upfront and checked the result afterwards. We need someone who already operates that way.
• You've never had to make a commercial trade-off - design that's user-optimal but expensive to build, or design that doesn't move retention.
• You’d struggle to explain how AI is changing what you ship, not just how you work. AI fluency is non-negotiable at this level.
• You expect to be handed a brief. At L6 you identify what's worth doing and bring the case for it.

A bit about you

• Experience: Roughly 8+ years of Product/UX Design experience, with a track record at senior IC level. SaaS or complex product experience is strongly preferred.
• Outcomes, not artefacts: You can point to design work you've shipped where you wrote the success measure upfront and read the result after release. You know what worked, what didn't, and what you'd do differently.
• Commercial fluency: You understand how the products you've worked on make money and you've made trade-offs informed by that.
• AI: Comfortable using AI across your workflow and equally comfortable thinking strategically about AI in the products you design - what makes a good AI feature, what the failure modes are, what to build now vs later.
• Craft: Your work is exemplary and you can articulate it clearly enough to teach. You have views on interaction quality, hierarchy, motion, microcopy - and you can defend them.
• Cross-functional: Comfortable as a peer at the table with product and engineering counterparts in your domain. Drive direction; don't wait for it.
• Open to flex: This is predominantly an IC role, but we're not rigid about it. If you've line-managed before, or want to take on one or two direct reports alongside the IC work, we're open to that conversation.

Research has shown that women tend to rule themselves out of applying for jobs unless they meet 100% of the requirements. If you fall into that category and are about to rule yourself out based on the above criteria, please consider applying anyway. We'd love to see your application.

Hybrid-working - you can work from home up to 4 days per week

Guilt-Free R&R - £1000 towards a holiday after your first year with the team (we'll even cover the tax!)

Joining a culture that supports your development and encourages growth

£500 yearly L&D budget for your career development

Your birthday on us - we pay, you stay away

'Give something back' - 2 paid days volunteering on us

Enhanced maternity, paternity & adoption pay

Public transport season ticket loans

Paid menopause leave

Joining a new team in an exciting business with huge ambition

Be a part of something bigger - everyone in our team is passionate about improving the entire property industry! It's a huge goal, but it motivates us to do better every single day

A chance to work on cutting-edge technology

Comfortable, relaxed office space - office dogs welcome!

Fully stocked fridge and beers (or an alternative) on us every Friday afternoon

Company and team off-sites, events and happy hours

Cycle to work scheme

Electric car salary sacrifice scheme

Feel good about sustainability - we're a climate-positive company!

We don't have a fixed band published for this role yet - it'll be calibrated based on your experience and scope.

We care deeply about helping the tech industry become a more inclusive and diverse place and we work hard to lead by example. We are committed to Equal Employment Opportunity through attracting and retaining a complementary team of employees and building an inclusive environment for all. Candidates must be eligible to live and work in the UK and be able to perform the work specified.

Interview Process

4 stages = An introductory call with one of our Talent team > Technical Interview inc a design task with our Head of UX > Final interview with our Co-Founder/Head of Product.

We want to make our interviews as inclusive as possible, so if you need any adjustments made or if there's anything you think we should be aware of during the interview process, please do let us know.

A note on using AI in your job application

As a fast-moving and rapidly evolving tech company, we embrace the advantages of AI and encourage its use throughout our application process. However, our goal is to get to know and hire the authentic you - your skills, experience, and values. We don't want to hire an AI-generated version of you. We consider AI to be a valuable tool, not something that should shadow you as an individual