Lead CX/UX Designer in Kingston upon Thames

As Lead CX/UX Designer - Tax & Accounting UK, you will lead the experience strategy for a portfolio of products within the UK Tax & Accounting business. You will align customer needs, business objectives, regulatory requirements, and technical capabilities to deliver meaningful and measurable outcomes for customers and the business. This is a strategic leadership role that combines hands‑on design expertise with the potential for future people leadership. You will help shape research and design strategy across the portfolio, ensuring UX priorities are aligned with business goals, product roadmaps, and customer needs. Over time, the role is expected to expand to include mentoring, developing, and potentially managing a team of 4‑5 designers.

Working closely with Product, Engineering, and senior business stakeholders, you will champion human‑centered design, drive innovation through research and service design, and help define the future of AI‑enabled experiences across our products. You will play a key role in ensuring that our solutions are accessible, scalable, and designed to meet the evolving needs of accounting and tax professionals in a rapidly changing regulatory and technology landscape.

Define and drive the experience vision across multiple products within the UK Tax & Accounting portfolio. Translate customer needs, business priorities, regulatory requirements, and technology opportunities into clear and actionable experience strategies. Partner closely with Product Management and Engineering to shape product vision, roadmap priorities, discovery activities, and delivery outcomes. Contribute to portfolio planning, strategic initiatives, and investment prioritization. Identify opportunities where UX research, service design, experimentation, or AI discovery can reduce risk and improve decision‑making. Ensure UX resources and capabilities are aligned with portfolio priorities and proactively identify future capacity needs. Establish measurable UX objectives and outcomes that support business growth, customer success, and operational efficiency. Advocate for customer‑centered decision‑making across the organization.

Lead the design strategy for AI‑powered, intelligent, automated, and agentic product experiences. Partner with Product and Engineering teams to identify high‑value AI opportunities across workflows, journeys, and product ecosystems. Guide teams in determining when AI is the right solution and when human expertise, transparency, or traditional workflows should remain central. Shape AI interaction models, conversational experiences, prompt design approaches, and user‑centered evaluation frameworks. Ensure AI capabilities deliver meaningful customer value and measurable outcomes rather than technology‑driven features. Champion responsible AI principles, including transparency, trust, explainability, accessibility, and user control. Promote effective internal use of AI tools within the design team to improve research, ideation, synthesis, prototyping, and productivity while maintaining quality and professional judgment.

Define and lead research strategy across the product portfolio. Partner with UX Researchers to conduct studies in complex, multi‑role, and highly regulated environments. Support research initiatives focused on AI‑enabled and intelligent user experiences. Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Design leaders to establish research priorities and strategic direction. Apply service design methodologies, including ecosystem mapping, service blueprinting, and end‑to‑end journey modeling. Build and evolve customer understanding frameworks across personas, segments, and maturity levels. Synthesize qualitative research and quantitative analytics into actionable insights and recommendations. Identify cross‑product workflow patterns, Jobs‑to‑be‑Done, and emerging customer opportunities.

Lead, coach, mentor, and develop a team of 4‑5 UX designers. Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, inclusion, and continuous learning. Provide regular feedback, performance coaching, and career development support. Help designers grow their strategic thinking, research, facilitation, and execution capabilities. Support recruitment, onboarding, and succession planning activities as needed. Encourage effective collaboration across design, product, engineering, and business teams.

Ensure consistent application and evolution of the Wolters Kluwer Product Design System. Establish and maintain high standards of usability, accessibility, and design quality. Facilitate design thinking workshops, ideation sessions, and strategic alignment activities. Act as a trusted partner between UX, Product Management, Engineering, and business stakeholders. Drive alignment across teams and ensure design decisions are informed by customer insights and business goals. Guide the integration of AI‑powered experiences, conversational interfaces, prompt design patterns, and responsible AI principles. Define and track UX and AI performance metrics to measure adoption, impact, and business value. Ensure design solutions are scalable, feasible, and aligned with technical constraints and opportunities.

10+ years of experience in UX Design, Product Design, Customer Experience Design, or related disciplines, ideally within complex B2B software environments. Proven experience leading design strategy across multiple products, platforms, or product portfolios. Demonstrated experience managing and developing designers through direct people leadership. Strong understanding of Lean Product Management, Lean UX, and customer‑centered product development. Experience working within cross‑functional product teams in Agile environments. Ability to influence senior stakeholders and drive strategic decisions through evidence‑based design practices. Experience within Tax & Accounting, Financial Services, Legal Technology, Compliance, or other regulated industries is highly desirable.

Expertise in design systems and scalable UX frameworks. Strong knowledge of accessibility standards, inclusive design principles, and WCAG compliance. Experience synthesizing qualitative research, customer feedback, behavioural data, and analytics. Familiarity with AI‑enabled experiences, prompt design approaches, LLM concepts, and evaluation methodologies. Advanced proficiency in Figma and modern design collaboration tools. Working knowledge of HTML5 and CSS fundamentals. Experience working within Agile software development environments.

Strategic thinker with strong business acumen and customer empathy. Excellent communication, facilitation, and stakeholder management skills. Ability to influence and align diverse stakeholders around a shared vision. Strong coaching and mentoring capabilities. Comfortable operating in ambiguity and driving clarity through collaboration. Passionate about innovation, continuous improvement, and building high‑performing teams.

Ability to clearly articulate your leadership contribution, cross‑functional collaboration, and measurable impact on business and customer outcomes. Comfortable presenting design strategy, research findings, and case studies to senior stakeholders and executive audiences. A portfolio demonstrating strategic thinking, leadership, end‑to‑end design execution, and measurable results across complex product ecosystems.