Lead Product Designer

Spruce; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Spruce—an ambitious UK startup helping heat pump installers—seeks a Lead Product Designer to own design across the product as we scale. You’ll shape the look and feel, set design standards, and raise the craft bar to match our ambitious roadmap.

Day to day you’ll do hands-on design, lead critical flows for both desktop tools and field apps, collaborate with engineers, and validate ideas with real installers on site to ensure practical, high-quality outcomes.

Qualifications

• Excellent craft in product UI and interaction design.
• Ability to lead design directions and set standards.
• Experience conducting user research with real customers.
• Comfortable juggling strategy and pixel-level work.
• Bonus for experience with field tools or operational workflows.

Responsibilities

• Owning design at Spruce - setting direction and standards across the product.
• Doing the hardest design work hands-on across desktop tools and field apps.
• Collaborating with developers and shipping code when appropriate.
• Researching and validating with installers on site to uncover pain points.

Skills

Product/UI design

Design leadership

User research

Cross-functional collaboration

Prototype development

Job description

In just over two years, we've gone from 0 to over 900 customers, succeeding where many have tried and failed before. We have a big mission: to make it wildly easier and more profitable to run and grow a renewables installation business - and through that to make a massive dent in the world's carbon emissions and create a hugely better experience for homeowners.

We're now looking for a Lead Product Designer to own design at Spruce: someone whose bar for craft is higher than ours, and who wants to set the standard for what our product looks and feels like as it gets more ambitious.

About Spruce

Almost 20% of the UK's carbon emissions comes from heating homes - there's simply no way to reach net zero without phasing out gas and oil boilers. Right now the only serious alternative is heat pumps, with their almost-magical ability to turn 1 kW of electricity into 3-5 kW of heat. But the heat pump installation journey is slow, inefficient, and just so painful. This makes it hard for existing installers to grow their businesses and puts off gas engineers from starting to do heat pumps. Perhaps most critically, it means you can't currently offer a heat pump when someone's boiler breaks and they urgently need heating.

We're fixing this. We've built a platform for heat pump installers to manage the whole installation journey from initial enquiry through to final compliance paperwork, freeing up their time to focus on what really matters: doing high-quality installations, providing great customer service, and scaling their business. Despite only getting started at the beginning of 2024, we're having a massive impact on installation businesses, suppliers, and manufacturers across the UK: halving the time they spend on each job and doubling their sales conversion rates.

We raised a chunky Seed round from top-tier investors and have been scaling the team to massively grow our impact. We're just about to launch solar and battery, and we're ultimately building the operating system for the whole home renewables supply chain. If you can picture a combination of ServiceTitan, Procore, and AutoCAD, you might get a sense of where we're headed...

The role

Our product handles building physics, fluid dynamics modelling and compliance - and is about to do a whole lot more. The job is to make all of that quick, intuitive and even delightful for a tradesperson who wants to spend as little time as possible at their desk. We've been design-led since the beginning, but the challenge is only growing as the product becomes (necessarily) more complex. Day-to-day you'll be:

• Owning design at Spruce - Setting the design direction and standards across the product, deciding what good looks like, and building the practice (critique, tooling, rituals) that lets us keep shipping fast as the product and team grow. You'll work alongside our two product designers, raising the bar on their work as well as your own.
• Doing the hardest design work yourself - This is a hands-on role. You'll take the gnarliest flows end to end: desktop design tools, homeowner-facing outputs, enquiry flows, mobile survey apps (incl. LiDAR), and collaborative workflows that work for everyone from a 3-person local installer to a national utility.
• Collaborating closely with developers & shipping code yourself - Understanding data structures and technical constraints so your designs ship quickly; and shipping PRs yourself when it makes sense (with the support of the dev team).
• Researching and validating - Spending time with installers on site to deeply understand how they work and what the core problems are; building quick prototypes to test decisions and uncover unexpected pain points.

You’ll report directly to Steph, our Co-Founder and CPO.

About you

We're looking for a designer with 6+ years of product/UI design experience (and potentially much more), including time as the most senior designer on a product or team -- ideally in a startup or a fast-moving, impact-focused environment. We'd love to speak with you if you have:

• Exceptional craft - You have a very high bar for UI execution and sweat the interaction details. You can point to work you'd happily put next to the best B2B products out there, and you can explain exactly why it good.
• A point of view - You hold strong design opinions, argue for them, and change your mind when the evidence says so. You'd rather be challenged than left alone.
• User obsession - You've run research with real customers yourself, not via a research team, and you've shipped things that measurably changed how they work.
• Range - You're proactive and self-organising, happy running several projects at once and switching between strategy and pixels in the same afternoon.
• Bonus if you've worked on tools for field teams, low-tech users, or operational workflows - but absolutely not a requirement.

Ou