Product Design Leader in Manchester

Kitman Labs is a global human performance company, disrupting and transforming the way the sports industry uses data to increase the performance of the world's top athletes. Driven by a passion to innovate in the areas of sports performance, analytics and user experience, we have assembled a team of the industry's top data scientists, sports performance scientists, product specialists and engineers. The company received recognition by Fast Company in 2019 as one of the most innovative companies in the world. Kitman Labs' advanced Outcome-driven Analytics and Performance Intelligence Platform are used by over 700 teams in 50 leagues on 6 continents spanning soccer, rugby, American football, baseball and ice hockey.

This role is responsible for leading, evolving, and modernising our design function in an AI native environment. This is a hands-on leadership role. You will lead a small but experienced design team while also personally delivering design work on priority initiatives. We are looking for someone who has managed designers, matured a design capability, and shipped meaningful products into the market. You understand how AI is reshaping product experience, user expectations, and competitive advantage. Most importantly, you have shipped AI enabled features that are live, adopted, and delivering measurable value.

Our platform supports elite sports organisations making critical decisions around performance, health, and operations. In this context, design is not aesthetic polish. It determines how intelligence is interpreted, how risk is communicated, and how confidently users act under pressure.

This role reports directly to the VP for Product Strategy and Innovation, with a clear mandate to lead design as a first class function. You will partner closely with Product Management, Engineering, and Data Science as a peer leader, shaping platform direction and defining how AI becomes a trusted and differentiating part of our experience. You will bring a clear perspective on where AI driven UX is heading and how we should evolve to meet it.

What You Will Own

• Design Leadership and Capability
  • Lead, mentor, and develop a high performing design team.
  • Set clear standards for craft, quality, and impact.
  • Embed design deeply within cross functional squads, ensuring influence from discovery through to delivery.
  • Introduce modern, AI assisted design workflows to improve speed, iteration, and experimentation.
  • Recruit and structure the team to support strategic priorities.
  • Contribute directly to design execution on key initiatives, particularly where speed, ambiguity, or complexity demands senior craft.
• AI Native Product Experience
  • Define how AI capabilities are expressed in product experiences, including summarisation, predictive insight, decision support, and workflow automation.
  • Translate complex data science outputs into clear, trusted, and explainable user interactions.
  • Design patterns that communicate confidence levels, uncertainty, and human oversight in AI systems.
  • Establish practical principles for responsible AI within the user experience, including transparency, feedback loops, and guardrails.
  • Personally lead design for AI enabled initiatives from discovery through to release and iteration.
• Future Facing AI UX
  • Bring a clear perspective on how AI will evolve UX over the next 2 to 5 years, and translate that into practical product direction.
  • Explore and prototype emerging interaction models such as conversational UI, voice, multimodal interaction, and agentic workflows.
  • Define when new interaction models create genuine user value in complex and time sensitive environments.
  • Partner with Engineering and Data Science to validate feasibility and measure outcomes.
  • Ensure new interaction models align with platform principles, trust requirements, and design system foundations.
• Strategic Product Influence
  • Contribute to product vision, roadmap definition, and long term platform direction.
  • Partner with senior internal stakeholders and external organisations, including leagues and elite sports clubs.
  • Balance user needs, commercial positioning, and technical feasibility in complex environments.
  • Ensure design directly supports competitive differentiation and go-to-market positioning.
• End to End Product Excellence
  • Lead discovery on high impact initiatives, from problem framing through to solution validation.
  • Oversee research, usability testing, and design quality assurance.
  • Ensure AI features are measurable, observable, and iterated based on real user behaviour and performance data.
  • Evolve and scale the design system to support emerging AI interaction models and reusable intelligence components.
  • Step in as a player coach when needed, producing high quality interaction design, prototyping, and final UI detail.

What We Are Looking For

• 8 to 12 years in product design, with 2 to 4 years managing designers.
• Proven experience leading design within a SaaS or data intensive product environment.
• Demonstrated track record of shipping AI enabled features into-market.
• Close collaboration experience with Engineering and Data Science teams.
• Experience designing for complex, information dense workflows.
• Experience in sport, performance, healthcare, or similarly high consequence domains is advantageous.

AI and Technical Fluency

• Strong working knowledge of LLM based systems, predictive models, and AI driven product features.
• Experience designing for explainability, human oversight, and system trust.
• Comfort using AI tools within the design process to accelerate prototyping and iteration.
• Ability to design within constraints such as latency, data quality variability, and model limitations.
• Familiarity with emerging interaction modalities such as conversational UI, voice, multimodal input, and agentic behaviours.

Craft and Systems Thinking

• A strong portfolio demonstrating strategic thinking, UX depth, and visual clarity.
• Strong design thinking skills are assumed.
• Demonstrated systems thinking, with the ability to design coherent experiences across complex and interconnected workflows.
• Experience building or scaling a design system.
• Ability to operate at both platform and interaction level detail.
• Clear communication of trade offs and design rationale.

Benefits

At Kitman Labs we pride ourselves on being the best and working with the best, so it should be no surprise that we are also dedicated to keeping the best through building a world-class work culture. We truly believe that a successful company begins through having an outstanding and inspiring culture, so our benefits reflect this:

• Competitive salary
• Health insurance for employee & dependants
• Meaningful equity
• Pension Plan
• Life Cover
• Income protection
• Wellbeing benefits

Location

While this role allows for remote work, occasional face-to-face gatherings are recommended.

Diversity

In addition to building a team with diverse skill-sets, Kitman Labs is committed to hiring people with diverse backgrounds. We do not discriminate based on age, civil or family status, disability, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation. If you are a person with a disability and require assistance during the application process, please let us know.

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