Lead Product Designer Job at City of London Full Time

Lead Product Designer

Leading UK Challenger Bank · London (Hybrid, 2 days onsite) · Permanent

The opportunity

This is a senior leadership role at one of the UK’s most recognised challenger banks; a business that has grown from a lending startup into a full-service consumer bank, and is still moving fast

You’ll lead product design for a core area of the product suite: a B2C experience used by hundreds of thousands of active customers to manage their finances in one place. The product is native mobile (iOS/Android), data-rich, and sits at the intersection of financial services and everyday consumer behaviour.

This isn’t a management role that used to be a design role. You’ll still be hands-on — setting the design direction, shaping the discovery process, influencing the roadmap — while leading a team of three product designers and being a visible voice for design across the business.

What you’ll be doing

• Leading a team of three product designers — setting direction, running regular 1:1s, supporting growth, and creating the conditions for great work
• Owning the end-to-end design of a core product area — from discovery and problem framing through to delivery and iteration
• Driving the design strategy for your product area, working closely with your PM and engineering lead to shape what gets built and why
• Running research and insight programmes — planning and facilitating your own studies, synthesising findings, and using them to validate ideas and inform the roadmap
• Influencing beyond your squad — facilitating workshops, aligning stakeholders across product, data, marketing, and leadership, and embedding better ways of working across the design
• teamContributing to the wider design community — helping shape the culture, standards, and practice of a 20+ person design function

What we’re looking for

• Essential Proven experience line managing product designers — you’ve held direct reports, run appraisals, managed performance, and actively developed people. This isn’t a first step into management.
• A career rooted in in-house B2C product teams — you understand what it means to own a problem space over time, not just deliver a project
• Deep experience with native mobile (iOS/Android) at meaningful consumer
• A discovery-first working style — you’re most at home shaping problem spaces, not executing against defined briefs
• Strong stakeholder influence — you’re comfortable challenging direction, facilitating alignment across seniority levels, and embedding new ways of working
• Confident running your own user research — moderated and unmoderated studies, synthesis, and connecting insight to product decisions

Strong differentiators

• Background in fintech, consumer finance, or other complex regulated B2C pr
• oductsExperience working within or contributing to a mature design
• systemTrack record of introducing or improving design processes across a team

The environment

• ~20-person design team with strong design leadership and genuine cultural investment in the discipline
• Cross-functional squads: PM, engineering, data, marketing, and analytics
• A defined north star vision already in place — this is about building toward it, not starting fromscratch
• Up to £105k base + bonus + benefits
• Hybrid: London-based, 2 days per week onsite (Tuesday squad day, Wednesday design day)

The hiring process

We’ve kept this straightforward and focused on the things that actually matter for t

• he role:Initial screen — a 30–45 minute conversation with our recruitment partner to explore your background, motivations, and fit against the brief
• Portfolio & skills workshop — a structured session with the hiring team to walk through your work and approach a real design challenge together. This is a conversation, not a test.
• Executive leadership meeting — a final conversation with senior leadership to discuss vision, ways of working, and mutual fit

A note on who thrives here

The best designers at this company are curious, direct, and confident operating in ambiguity. They don’t wait for a brief — they go and find the problem. They’re as comfortable in a room full of engineers and analysts as they are running a usability session. And they care about developing the people around them as much as they care about the product.