Principal Product Designer in Manchester

We're On the Beach! Since 2003, we've been rewriting the rules of how people discover, book, and experience their perfect getaway. What started as connecting people to short-haul beach holidays has evolved into something much bigger - premium beach destinations, long-haul adventures, and vibrant city breaks - and that's just the beginning of our story. We send around two million holidaymakers on their dream breaks every year. And we're still growing. Powered by our deep-rooted entrepreneurial spirit, proprietary tech, curiosity and our incredible people, we're accelerating - delivering best in class technology, the ultimate holiday app, and experiences that keep our customers coming back for more.

About the Role

This is a Principal Product Designer role focused on retention: keeping customers coming back, holiday after holiday. That means owning the post-booking experience, giving people hiccup-free holidays and easy self-service when plans change, and working with marketing and customer operations to build loyalty that makes the next booking feel obvious. It's a big space with plenty to get your teeth into. The role has two sides. You'll help set the direction, working across our cross-functional teams (engineers, product managers, researchers, marketing and more) as an equal voice on where we take the experience and why. And you'll stay close to the craft; modern tooling means one experienced designer can now do what used to take a team, and we've shaped the organisation around that. The most senior people here own the most important problems directly, and do the work.

What you’ll be doing day to day:

• Partner with the people who own our customer outcomes as an equal voice on vision, priorities and the value question, keeping a relentless focus on customer and business value, grounded in a real understanding of the unit economics.
• Build a deep picture from data, customer insight and the wider market, and use it to spot the opportunities worth chasing.
• Hold the end-to-end view: how the parts add up to one coherent experience, and where the next step change comes from.
• Align teams and departments, and coach the designers around you.
• Move fast from idea to tested prototype, and design to a high bar that strengthens our design system.

You'll report to the Director of Product Design. There may be some people management depending on how the team evolves, but it's secondary: seniority here is about owning the hardest problems, not the size of your team.

You’ll be a great addition to our team if you have the following skills, knowledge and experience:

• A senior designer with several years on customer-facing products, who shapes direction and partners on outcomes (e-commerce experience a plus, not a requirement).
• Someone who wants the accountability, comfortable setting a direction, standing behind it, and being measured on what it delivers.
• Comfortable driving across a cross-functional group: aligning people, influencing without authority, holding the whole picture.
• Fluent with the commercial and customer picture, and reaches for data and testing to know whether you're right.
• At home with pace, ambiguity and modern tooling, and keen to use it to get from concept to something real, quickly.

We'd love a portfolio that tells us about your thinking and what you learned, as much as the final designs.

What to expect from our interview process:

• Intro call (20 mins, with our Talent team): The basics: what you're looking for, fit, right to work, and salary expectations. A good moment to ask anything early about the role or package.
• Hiring manager interview (1 hour, with our Director of Product Design): We'd love to hear about your background, plus a quick informal walkthrough of some of your work, around 15 minutes. We'll also tell you much more about the role and company, and there's time for any questions you have for the hiring manager.
• Project walkthrough (1 hour, with a cross-functional panel): Present one or two projects to a small panel of your future peers, around 30 minutes, then questions. This is also a great opportunity for you to hear how our cross-functional teams work.
• Leadership interview (45 mins, with our senior leaders): A conversation with leaders from Product, Data, Engineering and People about how you think, lead and make an impact. These will be great people to answer questions about our culture, strategy, and anything else on your mind.

We want to make sure everybody has the opportunity to perform at their best. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the interview process please let the Talent Acquisition team know and they will be happy to assist.

Ways of working:

Our full time hours are 37.5 per week, but we don't have rigid working hours so you can find the working pattern that's right for you. We have core working hours between 10am - 4pm, so we can collaborate and enjoy the social side of work. We also have hybrid working so we all work from home and from our Aeroworks office in Manchester City Centre. You'll be in the office one day every two weeks, and you're more than welcome to come in more if you'd like.

Our benefits:

We might be biased but we think our colleagues are pretty great. They're the people that have made On the Beach what it is today and continue to make it vibrant and successful tomorrow. That's why we offer a benefits package, known as our Beach Perks, to all On the Beach colleagues. We offer a competitive salary alongside performance-based annual bonuses and LTIP to reward your sustained impact.

• 25 days holiday plus your birthday off.
• Generous discount on holidays, plus you will receive 2 extra days annual leave on top of your holiday allowance to use whilst you're away on your On the Beach package holiday.
• Access to Learnerbly learning platform, plus workshops, courses and professional qualifications.
• Enhanced maternity, paternity, shared parental leave and adoption pay, plus other family friendly support.
• Employee Assistance Programme and free access to counselling.
• Simplyhealth Optimise Health Plan.
• Company Sick Pay scheme.
• Regular wellbeing events.
• Gym discount.
• Share Incentive Plan (SIP).
• Death in Service cover.
• Onsite subsidised coffee shop.
• The Sandbox (our very own bar).
• Food and drink discounts across a number of venues in Manchester City Centre.
• Regular social events.
• Cycle to Work scheme.