Head of Experience Design - AI Lab in London

We are looking for a Head of Experience Design to join On's newly formed AI Lab. The AI Lab is a small cross-functional team who, unlike our core digital product teams, are tasked with looking 18+ months into the future. Our vision is to shape the future of AI-driven digital experiences, inspiring innovation and empowering everyone to push boundaries and redefine what's possible.

You will operate between London and Zurich, working extremely collaboratively to conceive, ideate, prototype and validate the future vision of On's relationship with its customers via emerging technologies.

Your Team

You will be part of a small cross-functional team of senior strategic practitioners, including creative technology, engineering, product management, design and research. We envision On's digital future by leveraging customer insights, conducting R&D on emerging technologies, and developing prototypes that serve as the foundation for new products and services. As a small team we are all required to contribute to every phase of ideation from research to development of product blueprints the digital team can build. Our mission requires us to be comfortable with divergent and convergent thinking, collaboration within the team and externally to stakeholders, anyone in the wider organisation or external partners.

Crucially, this is not a team that simply executes requests. We act as an 'insight engine,' identifying opportunities in the market and generating our own briefs based on a deep understanding of consumers, technical innovations and On's evolving business landscape.

The role

• Startup agility & organisational understanding: You can operate in a startup environment - flat hierarchy, multiple hats, fast decisions. But you stay deeply connected to the wider business, helping inspiration to flow both ways.
• Comfort with ambiguity: You thrive without a roadmap, taking abstract goals and rapidly visualising solutions. Undefined requirements excite you rather than frustrate you.
• Buy-in through storytelling: You create work with the fidelity and narrative quality to sell the vision to Founders, Executive Board, and global partners. Helping to create consensus through tangible examples.
• Proactive brief generation: You don’t wait for assignments. You identify opportunities through consumer insight, technical exploration, and market understanding. You build 'source of truth' prototypes that prove the unknown, then create blueprints others can scale.
• Divergent and convergent agility: You open up problem spaces and narrow them down to something actionable, you understand when we need to go wide and narrow.
• Strategic maker: You think strategically but get your hands dirty. You’re equally comfortable in stakeholder workshops and prototyping.
• Evidence-based conviction: You form strong points of view based on evidence, not trends. You advocate for ideas while remaining open to being wrong.

Head of Experience Design

• Problem space definition: You define and articulate the problem space, not just solve problems handed to you. You take high-level ambitions and structure them into tangible service blueprints, identifying gaps between customer goals and motivations.
• Methodological flexibility and invention: You’re fluent in a wide range of research, design thinking, and validation techniques. Working in nascent opportunity spaces, you adapt established methods or define new ones. You are comfortable having an evolving understanding through research, knowing when we need certainty and when uncertainty is OK.
• Organisational integration architect: You will be key in defining how the Lab engages with the wider business, creating processes that bring stakeholders into our work at the right moments. You run workshops that incorporate wider teams into discovery and validation. You present work strategically - knowing when we need buy-in, when we need to contextualise customer insights and when we're helping predict market trends.
• End-to-end journey orchestration: You design complete customer experiences that span physical products, digital touchpoints, retail, and services. You understand how AI can enhance or transform these journeys, not just add features.
• Physical and digital fluency: You test experiences in the real contexts where they’ll be used - movement, weather, physical constraints. You understand how wearables, spatial computing, and physical products create different design challenges than screen-based experiences.
• Ethnographic insight to opportunity: You move beyond analytics to lived experience. You identify unmet needs and behavioral patterns that become the foundation for new product concepts and lab briefs.
• Service ecosystem thinking: You map connections between On's products, digital experiences, retail partners, and third-party platforms. You design for AI experiences that work across this ecosystem seamlessly.
• Research to prototype fluency: You move from user research to experience concepts to service blueprints comfortably. You make abstract insights concrete through storyboards, journey maps, and experience prototypes that teams can build from.
• Leading through influence and development: As leader in the team, you shape experience strategy through your work while coaching and mentoring people in these strategies. You build conviction in stakeholders about what customers actually need and elevate the team’s capability.

Your story

• Senior experience design leadership: Significant track record defining customer experiences and problem spaces, not just documenting them. You’ve shaped product strategy and driven commercial outcomes through customer insight.
• Innovation or emerging technology context: Experience working on 0-1 products, new service models, or experiences with emerging technologies. You’ve designed when established patterns didn’t exist and worked within teams whose mandate was invention.
• Pattern recognition and synthesis: You recognize themes across projects and synthesize learning. You’re a thought leader who communicates insights that shape how teams think about problems.
• End-to-end ownership: Portfolio shows complete journeys, not just individual touchpoints. You’ve designed experiences that span multiple channels, physical contexts, and stakeholder groups.
• Participatory collaboration: You refuse cold handoffs. You work extremely collaboratively in cross-functional teams, testing and iterating constantly and explaining outputs throughout, not just at the end.
• Physical product experience: You’ve tested and designed for physical devices, wearables, or hardware in real-world contexts. You understand constraints of movement, weather, and physical use that screen-based design doesn’t face.
• Influence at senior levels: Track record of facilitating cross-functional teams and influencing at C-suite or board level. You make complex service systems understandable and actionable.
• Consumer product impact: You’ve taken experience concepts from research through to launched services in consumer-facing contexts, ideally in active lifestyle, sports, wellness, retail, or adjacent categories.

What we offer

We offer a dynamic, challenging and sportive environment that has been ranked as the 'fastest growing sports company' of its time. With offices across the globe, we are an international team who is hungry to innovate and build something incredible. We foster an active environment where each individual thrives for excellence and can achieve their full potential. This is where your work matters, you’re hands-on and your team members are amongst the very best in their respective disciplines and fields.

If you are driven to bring On to the next level, curious about the opportunity and want to be part of our growing team send us your application, and join the ONiverse!

On is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to creating a work environment that is fair and inclusive, where all decisions related to recruitment, advancement, and retention are free of discrimination.