Product Design Lead

APOLITICAL; City Of London; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A public service technology organization in London seeks a Design Head to enhance their product design process. You will lead a collaborative team to innovate and improve user experience for public servants globally. Ideal candidates have a strong design portfolio and are comfortable with both strategic and hands-on work in design management.

Qualifications

• Demonstrates process as well as outcomes in design.
• Skilled in leading workshops and design sprints.
• Comfortable with both qualitative and quantitative research.

Responsibilities

• Shape the end-to-end design process across product portfolio.
• Build a high-functioning design team.
• Establish a culture of design-led innovation.

Skills

Product/UX design portfolio

Design thinking

Facilitation skills

Experience building design systems

Research literacy

Job description

Overview

• Start date: ASAP
• Reporting to: Chief Product Officer
• Visa sponsorship: UK national or visa holder preferred, but not a dealbreaker.
• Background checks: Due to the nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history and right to work.
• You can expect to hear from us, no matter the outcome, by: 24th October 2025
• Salary expectations: We aim for transparency on salary bands. If our range is misaligned with your expectations, we’d welcome an open conversation as early as possible.

Role

We’re looking for a design head who doesn’t just produce great designs but builds a repeatable, collaborative design process that scales. You’ll work with product, engineering, and leadership teams to institutionalise design excellence, from discovery through to delivery. You will coach designers, advocate for design as a strategic function, and foster innovation across the team.

In this role, you will:

• Shape the end-to-end design process across our product portfolio.
• Ensure design informs product strategy and roadmap decisions.
• Raise the standard of user experience for thousands of public servants globally.
• Build a high-functioning design team that multiplies the impact of product and engineering.
• Establish a culture of design-led innovation that helps Apolitical scale its mission.

Team

You’ll join our Product and Engineering, working closely with product managers, engineers, and company leadership. You will line-manage one designer to begin with.

Remit

You will:

• Define and own our end-to-end product design process, ensuring it is repeatable, collaborative, and effective.
• Partner with product and engineering leads to integrate design seamlessly into product roadmaps.
• Lead user research, usability testing, and synthesis to inform design decisions.
• Build and mentor a growing design team, instilling best practices and creative confidence.
• Facilitate workshops and co-creation sessions that bring cross-functional teams into the design process.
• Set and maintain high standards for design quality, ensuring consistency across our product.
• Balance rapid iteration with long-term design vision, ensuring scalability as we grow.

You won’t

• Work in isolation: design at Apolitical is deeply collaborative.
• Focus only on aesthetics: this role is about systems, strategy, and outcomes.
• Treat AI as a gimmick: you’ll know when to deploy it for efficiency and when human-led design is essential.

Role expectations

Within one month, you will:

• Familiarise yourself with our product suite, users, and mission.
• Review existing design processes and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Begin line management and 1:1s with our designer.

Within three months, you will:

• Establish a clear design process and ways of working with product and engineering.
• Lead your first major discovery and usability testing cycle.
• Deliver improvements to our design system for consistency and scalability.

Within six months, you will:

• Embed design as a strategic function in product planning.
• Grow the design team’s confidence and capability through mentoring.
• Deliver demonstrable improvements in product usability and user satisfaction.

About you

This is a great fit if you…

• Have a product/UX design portfolio that demonstrates process as well as outcomes.
• Understand design thinking, lean UX, and collaborative product discovery.
• Are a skilled facilitator, comfortable leading workshops, ideation sessions, and design sprints.
• Have experience building and operationalising design systems and processes.
• Know how to deploy AI effectively while maintaining human oversight for strategy, empathy, and ethics.
• Are research-literate, using both qualitative and quantitative insights to inform design.
• Have are honing your management skills: coaching, mentoring, and growing designers; building design culture in a product organisation.
• Can operate both strategically (setting vision and process) and tactically (stepping in hands-on when necessary).
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and capable of creating structure.

Don’t meet every single expectation? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Apolitical is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Application Process

Apolitical uses Applied in our recruitment. Applied aims to overcome unconscious bias in recruiting. Instead of using your CV alone, we’ll be asking you to answer questions to test skills needed for the role. The answers are then anonymised, and reviewed in a random order by members of our team.

The Applied platform also asks some demographic questions before you start your application. These answers are never visible to the hiring team and don’t affect your application in any way. We only see summary statistics to help us check if our candidate pool is balanced and if everyone has an equal chance to get hired irrespective of their background. If you prefer, you can easily opt out of answering these questions.

Using AI in your application answers

At Apolitical, we embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work. However, as AI becomes more prevalent, it can be difficult to distinguish between machine-generated content and the unique perspectives of candidates. We’re excited to see how you use AI tools to structure and refine your answers, but we value your unique insights above all else. Ensure your application reflects your voice and how your skills align with our mission.