Senior E2E Product Designer in London

Requirements

You don’t need to be an engineer — but you should be motivated to take ideas beyond design and into real, shipped product experiences. If you read all this and thought “hell yes” (even if it’s a slightly nervous one), then please apply. If you skimmed and thought “maybe,” apply anyway — you’ll get a clearer sense once we chat. We’re always open to great people, even if the timing isn’t perfect. We welcome applicants with diverse backgrounds and different experiences and perspectives — just like the staff who teach through Zen and the children at the schools we work with.

What the job involves

We’re looking for a Senior Product Designer who wants to do meaningful work at the intersection of service, system, and interface design — and is excited by the idea of not just designing solutions, but helping bring them to life end-to-end. This is not a traditional design role. At Zen, design is evolving into a product‑building discipline. That means moving fluidly from problem framing → flows → prototypes → real, working product — often within the same role. You’ll still care deeply about users, clarity, and craft. But you’ll also be excited to own more of how things actually work and get shipped.

Design at Zen is becoming more end‑to‑end. Our designers don’t just define problems and create interfaces — they increasingly shape solutions, prototype them in code, and help ship them into production. With tools like Lovable, Claude, and others, the line between design, product, and engineering is blurring. We’re leaning into that.

In practice, this means:

• Moving faster from idea → prototype → live product
• Owning more of the “how it works,” not just “how it looks”
• Reducing handoffs and increasing accountability
• Treating design as a core product‑building discipline, not a stage in a process
• Owning problems end‑to‑end — from discovery through to shipped product
• Designing flows, systems, and interfaces that are simple, scalable, and high‑quality
• Staying close to the customer — building a deep understanding of educators, schools, and internal teams, and how they actually work day‑to‑day
• Building and contributing to our research machine — continuously learning through interviews, observation, data, and real product usage
• Turning insight into action — shaping problems, validating direction, and informing what gets built (not just justifying decisions after the fact)
• Creating fast feedback loops — testing ideas early through prototypes, conversations, and live experiments
• Prototyping and validating ideas quickly, using modern tools (including AI‑assisted ones)
• Bringing ideas to life beyond static design — exploring interaction, logic, and behaviour in real environments
• Collaborating deeply with engineers and PMs, while increasingly contributing directly to implementation
• Using judgement to balance speed vs quality, shipping early and iterating often
• Synthesising and sharing learning — building shared understanding across the team, not letting insight sit in silos
• Mentoring other designers and contributing to raising the bar across the team
• Shaping how we work, as design continues to evolve at Zen

You’ll work across the full product lifecycle — from early discovery through to delivery — with a focus on user outcomes, speed of learning, and design quality. A typical loop might look like:

• Speaking to educators or school staff to understand a problem in depth
• Synthesising insights (e.g. in tools like Dovetail) to shape a clear direction
• Rapidly exploring solutions through flows, prototypes, or lightweight builds — often going beyond or bypassing Figma
• Testing ideas early — through conversations, interactive prototypes, or live experiments
• Iterating quickly based on feedback and real usage
• Collaborating closely with engineers — and sometimes writing or shaping production code (e.g. via tools like Claude)
• Shipping improvements and continuing to learn

You’ll operate in tight loops between customer insight → prototype → shipped product → learning — helping us close the gap between idea and reality, and ensuring what we build is grounded in real needs.