Lead Product Designer

Start Date: Immediate start

Functional Area and Department: Digital and Creative

Location: UK (remote)

Reports to (Title): Senior Director of Product

Days: 3 days per week

Rate: £600 per day (8-hour day)

Job Summary: As the Lead Product Designer for Olivela, you will sit within the Product team as an extension and representative of the Creative team, setting the standard for design quality and practice across all digital channels. You will formally report to the Senior Director of Product, with a dotted line into the Creative Director, reflecting the dual nature of this role and the importance of brand alignment at every level. You will be a senior voice in the business for UX and UI design, aligning closely with our Creative Director to ensure every Olivela digital touchpoint reflects the Olivela brand at its best. This is a leadership role without direct reports. You will be expected to mentor and guide other contributors across the business who touch design, set best practices, and raise the bar for design thinking organisation-wide. You will influence senior management and C-suite stakeholders as a matter of course, using clear design rationale, strategic framing, and commercial awareness to bring decision-makers with you. You will own the governance and organisation of all design files, define how design work is structured and handed off, and lead any formal design system or guidelines project that the business requires. Your work will be grounded in continuous discovery, balancing user needs with business outcomes to deliver experiences that are beautiful, on-brand, and results-driven.

Reporting Relationships: This role is an individual contributor with design leadership responsibility across the product and creative functions. No direct reports; expected to mentor and guide other designers and cross-functional contributors who engage with design.

Essential Functions:

• Define and own the UX and UI standard across all Olivela digital channels, setting the benchmark for quality, consistency, and brand alignment.
• Lead the creation and maintenance of a design system in line with the brand guidelines for digital, driving adoption across product, engineering, and creative teams.
• Mentor and guide other contributors who touch design work, elevating design literacy and craft across the organisation.
• Own the governance of all design files in Figma, establishing and maintaining a well-structured, scalable, and team-accessible file system.
• Set and champion design best practices for web and app, ensuring all output is in line with the Olivela look and feel and industry standards.
• Partner closely with the Creative Director and Creative team to bridge brand and product design, ensuring a consistent luxury experience across all channels.
• Lead UX research and experimentation initiatives to inform the Product Roadmap, bringing structured insights to prioritisation decisions.
• Work closely with Software Engineers and Product Managers to translate business goals into high-quality, feasible design solutions that drive conversion, revenue, and profit.
• Deliver end-to-end customer journey mapping, wireframes at all fidelity levels, sitemaps, and prototypes.
• Play a leading role in continuous discovery, capturing and synthesising customer insights to identify opportunities and address problems.
• Apply human-centred design principles across both form and function, ensuring experiences are accessible, intuitive, and on-brand.
• Define and own grid systems and spatial standards across digital, ensuring layout consistency at every breakpoint and across all templates.
• Collaborate with the Creative team on typographic standards for digital, contributing a strong product design perspective while respecting Creative Director on brand typography.
• Define standards for motion and interaction design across the digital product, setting the quality bar for micro-interactions, transitions, and animated states even where these are executed by engineering.
• Contribute heavily to how video and rich media are used across digital channels, including PDPs, editorial, and campaign landing pages, ensuring production quality and brand consistency.

Knowledge, Skills, and Experience required:

• 5+ years of experience in product or UX/UI design, with a track record of leading design quality in a commercial digital environment.
• A portfolio that demonstrates design leadership, not just execution: clear evidence of systems thinking, stakeholder influence, and measurable impact.
• Expert command of UX principles and the ability to articulate and defend design decisions at every level of the business.
• Expert-level Figma skills, including component libraries, auto-layout, prototyping, variables, and file governance.
• Demonstrated experience owning or contributing significantly to a design system, including documentation and cross-functional rollout.
• Strong understanding of grid systems, spatial design, and layout principles for responsive web and app environments.
• Working knowledge of motion and interaction design principles, with the ability to define standards and brief or review animated states.
• Experience working across digital and physical or print touchpoints, with confidence extending design thinking beyond screen-based channels.
• An eye for photography, art direction, and creative production, with experience in or exposure to luxury brand environments.
• Experience in e-commerce (Shopify experience a strong plus) and luxury retail.
• Strong working knowledge of Shopify Themes and front-end implementation constraints, enabling productive collaboration with engineering.
• Comfortable working with quantitative and qualitative data (analytics, A/B testing, usability research) to inform and validate decisions.
• Proven ability to work independently, manage competing priorities, and drive work to completion without close supervision.

Competencies:

• A natural design leader who sets direction through example, clarity, and conviction rather than authority.
• Exceptionally strong communicator, able to present design thinking persuasively to senior and executive audiences and bring stakeholders to a decision.
• Commercially minded, with the ability to connect design decisions to revenue, conversion, and brand value.
• Highly organised, with a methodical approach to file management, documentation, and cross-functional ways of working.
• Collaborative by default, but confident holding the line on design quality when it matters.
• Curious, user-obsessed, and always looking for the next opportunity to improve the experience.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, able to define structure where none exists and move quickly when needed.

Physical Requirements/Factors: Employee must be available to work and to interact with Company personnel and others in the performance of the job duties during the Company’s regular business hours. Exempt employees must also be available to work and interact with others during other times as needed, which may vary depending on such factors as different time zones, availability of persons or equipment, deadlines, etc.

All roles: The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Olivela is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. This job description is not all-inclusive. It acts as a guideline and is subject to change over time. Additional duties may be assigned based on business needs.

Please email your resume and portfolio to hr@olivela.com