Senior Retail Product Designer in London

About the role

As a Partner in Retail, you’re accountable for retail excellence with a relentless connection to customers and shops alike, dedicated support for today's demands, and visionary strides to shape, optimise, and revolutionise the future of retail. Rooted in adaptability, driven by a continuous improvement mindset, and fueled by a commitment to getting it right the first time, our Retail Support Teams are the dynamic force steering a thriving and innovative retail ecosystem of John Lewis Partnership.

As a Senior Retail Product Designer you’ll be part of a cross-functional Strategy and design team, leading the design that services both our strategy and product teams. You will be responsible for the entire Product Design lifecycle from initial discovery & vision setting, through to the execution of final UI designs.

Salary: £52,000 - £80,000

Contract type: This position is a Permanent role

Working pattern/flexible working: The Partnership has adopted a hybrid working approach, meaning you'll be able to work a mixture between the office and home based upon your personal needs whilst balancing the needs of the business. Alongside this we have also signalled a clear intent for Central teams to work ‘more in person than not’ hybrid way of working. For the Waitrose Innovation and change team, this means 2-3 days a week of in-person time but it is not a hard and fast rule requiring everyone to be in the office 3 days a week. Supplier visits, time in our shops and time in the office all contribute to this requirement.

Location: Bracknell

Key responsibilities:

• Lead design for retail’s product areas. This includes driving the future vision of this area, making sure it complements a cohesive overall Waitrose experience, and delivering on incremental steps to help the team head in this direction.
• Work in a cross-functional team. You'll be responsible for all design artefacts produced; from initial discovery and user journey mapping through to the execution of final UI design details.
• Deeply understand the customers you're designing for. Whether it's joining user research sessions, learning from previous insights, reading data reports or running your own lightweight research and analysis, you'll strive to understand the what, why and how of the problems you're solving for to ensure we don't just build the thing right, but we build the right thing.
• Collaborate regularly using strong communication, documentation and facilitation skills. You'll work closely with Product Owners, Engineers, Data Scientists, and User researchers to make sure your team isn't just shipping great designs, but they are deeply involved throughout the design process.
• Execute (and advocate for) polished, intuitive and accessible user experiences. You're pragmatic and able to balance the ideal experience with knowing where and when to make scoping trade-offs based on technical constraints, experimentation strategy or business risk.

Essential skills/experience you’ll need:

• Experience working as part of a Product Team in an agile environment
• Experience working through the Product Design lifecycle from discovery/research through to the final UI design with a portfolio to showcase this work
• Agile scrum experience: working in sprints with backlogs and feature sets
• Ability to think at a high level about product strategy and clearly articulate design decisions
• Understanding of the technical implications of design decisions
• Passion for problem solving and UX Design
• Excellent communication skills and people-focused design mentality to help set up frameworks and brainstorm initial design concepts

Desirable skills/experience you may have:

• Retail ecommerce experience within a large organisation
• Experience working with modern design tools like Figma
• Experience in front-end programming and the ability to code simple prototypes
• Experience in designing and maintaining cross-platform design systems
• Experience conducting research

About The Partnership

We’re the largest employee owned business in the UK and home of our cherished brands, John Lewis and Waitrose. We’re not just employees, we’re Partners, driven by our purpose to build a happier world. As we look to our future, there’s never been a more exciting time to join us.

We’re ruthlessly focused on being brilliant at retail. We continue to innovate, adapt and diversify. Never Knowingly Undersold on price, quality and service in John Lewis and passionately serving food-lovers in Waitrose.

As Partners we all share the responsibility of ownership and in its rewards. We use our voices to contribute to our success, working together through the good and challenging times, holding true to our behaviours and treating everyone with kindness and respect.

We all own making the Partnership somewhere we belong. Embracing our differences and creating an environment where we’re free to be ourselves and can THRIVE. Growing ourselves individually, and as a collective.

As Partners, we make all the difference. And, we all own it.

Important points to note:

• It’s important to note that some of our roles are subject to pre-employment vetting (which may include DBS checks for successful candidates). If required, you’ll be informed and provided with information about vetting during the recruitment process and we encourage you to complete any vetting documents quickly to avoid delays. Any DBS checks required will be carried out by a third-party registered body and financial probity checks may also be required for some of our roles.
• We occasionally close vacancies early in the event we receive a high volume of applications, and therefore, we recommend you apply early.
• If you require a reasonable adjustment due to a disability which means you may need longer to complete your application please contact us as soon as possible.
• We want all of our Partners to have a good work-life balance and we support flexible working. This might mean flexible or compressed hours, job sharing or shorter hour contracts, where possible. Please discuss this further with the hiring manager during your interview.