Lead Product Designer in London

About Yoto

We are looking for a Lead Product Designer to join our Product Design team to lead the Player Experience cluster, shaping how families discover, set up, and enjoy Yoto every day. Yoto is a screen‐free interactive platform for kids. We make carefully connected audio players that kids control, with no microphones, cameras or ads. We have a catalogue of audio that inspires creative play and learning with 1,000+ titles in our card store from top creators, publishers and labels – think Disney, Marvel, Roald Dahl and Universal Music. We also create Yoto Originals like BrainBots.

We are on a mission to be the soundtrack of childhood, helping families on their unique adventures. By creating products that inspire independent play, we help families discover and grow with an inspiring world of audio, and we would like you to help us achieve it.

Yoto's Product Design Team

The Product Design team at Yoto shapes how families experience our audio players and the digital ecosystem around them. This Lead Product Designer role is a true player–coach position, combining hands‐on design work with sustained people leadership across the Player Experience cluster. The cluster focuses on key moments in a family's journey – from first‐time setup and early engagement to everyday listening, playback, and content discovery. This role carries responsibility for the quality of individual design outcomes and for how multiple designers, squads, and partners come together to deliver cohesive, intuitive experiences at scale.

What you'll be doing

• Owning design outcomes across the Player Experience cluster, leading work spanning player setup, playback experiences, core app foundations, and content discovery, while ensuring decisions connect to customer and business outcomes.
• Line‐managing and coaching designers across multiple squads, setting clear expectations, supporting progression, managing performance, and developing future design leaders while raising overall design maturity.
• Operating as a player‐coach: spending part of your time designing within the Content Discovery squad while supporting other designers to deliver high‐quality work.
• Setting and evolving design direction in partnership with the Head of Design and other Lead and Principal Product Designers, aligning work across squads and influencing cross‐functional partners (marketing, hardware, content, customer support).
• Making design decisions under ambiguity, navigating competing priorities, differing opinions, and real‐world constraints to help teams commit to clear direction.
• Working closely with Heads of Product, Engineering, Brand, and more to prioritise effectively, resolve tension, and strengthen design partnership across the business.
• Raising the overall bar for craft and quality through critique, coaching, and feedback that helps designers consistently deliver strong usability, visual and interaction design.
• Contributing to long‐term capability building across design and research, improving ways of working, identifying skill and process gaps, and shaping product design operations as Yoto grows.

What you'll bring

Essential

• Extensive experience as a product designer and design leader with proven people leadership responsibility for setting direction and supporting growth of designers.
• Proven track record of leading multiple designers and complex problem spaces simultaneously, balancing hands‐on contribution with oversight and prioritisation.
• Strong experience designing across native apps and web, ensuring consistency across platforms.
• High bar for visual and interaction design, paired with strong discovery, problem‐framing, and research collaboration skills.
• Strong people‐leadership skills: goal setting, feedback, performance conversations, and coaching others through growth and change.
• Ability to bring clarity to ambiguity, make prioritisation decisions that stick, and focus work that delivers greatest customer and business impact.

Nice to have

• Experience working on consumer products used daily by families or children.
• Experience designing for hardware‐adjacent or connected products.

Salary

£90,000 – £100,000 based on experience.

Benefits

• Flexibility – hybrid working (1 day a week in London office; work from anywhere for up to 6 weeks a year). Summer Hours policy for June and August.
• Financial – Income Protection, Life Assurance, workplace pension (up to 3% employer contribution). Generous employee referral bonus scheme.
• Health & Wellness – Private Medical Insurance (Aviva) or Wellbeing Allowance, EAP (WeCare), unlimited dental advice, bike‐to‐work scheme.
• Time Off – 25 days holiday + bank holidays, birthday off, +1 extra day per year after 2 years (up to 5 extra days). Sabbatical policy up to 3 months unpaid after 4 years.
• Family leave – enhanced maternity/paternity, adoption, fertility, pregnancy loss and carers leave. Workplace nursery scheme for preschool‐aged children.
• People & Planet – up to 2 volunteer days a year, Book Allowance up to £50 a year.
• Fun Perks – Yoto player and starter pack of cards, company socials, annual YotoFest.

Equity and Diversity

We are committed to fostering a safe, diverse, and inclusive environment where all individuals feel valued and supported. Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion group holds bi‐monthly forums to elevate diverse voices and perspectives. We invite candidates from all walks of life to explore opportunities with us and join a company that champions flexibility, equity, and inclusion.

Please only apply or engage with Yoto jobs posted on our careers page (careers.yotoplay.com or careers.yotoplay.com/en). All correspondence from our Talent team will only come through Teamtailor, our application tracking system.