Lead Product Designer

We’re 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.

About Yoto

Yoto is a screen‑free interactive audio 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.

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 some of the most important moments in a family’s journey, from first‑time setup and early engagement, to everyday listening, playback, and content discovery.

This role carries responsibility not just for the quality of individual design outcomes, but for how multiple designers, squads, and partners come together to deliver cohesive, intuitive experiences at scale. By setting clear direction, making thoughtful trade‑offs, and supporting others to do their best work, this role plays a key part in helping Yoto inspire imagination without screens.

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 taking accountability for the quality, coherence, and impact of what ships, and ensuring design decisions connect clearly 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 creating an environment of trust, focus, and psychological safety, and raising the overall maturity of design leadership within the team.
• Operating as a player‑coach, spending a portion of your time hands‑on designing within the Content Discovery squad, while also ensuring other designers are supported, unblocked, and delivering high‑quality work.
• Setting and evolving design direction in close partnership with the Head of Design and other Lead and Principal Product Designers, aligning work across squads and influencing cross‑functional partners such as marketing, hardware, content, and customer support to ensure design intent is understood and upheld end‑to‑end.
• Making design decisions under ambiguity, navigating competing priorities, differing opinions, and real‑world constraints, and helping teams commit to clear direction even when there’s no perfect answer.
• Working closely with Heads of Product, Engineering, Brand and more to prioritise effectively, resolve tension, turn complex and open ended problems into clear actionable plans, and strengthen how design partners with other functions across the business.
• Raising the overall bar for craft and quality, not just through your own work, but through critique, coaching, and feedback that helps designers consistently deliver strong usability, visual design, and interaction design.
• Contributing to long‑term capability building across design and research, improving ways of working, identifying skill and process gaps, and helping shape how product design operates and is perceived across Yoto as the company continues to grow.

What you’ll bring

Essential

• Extensive experience as a product designer and design leader, with proven people leadership responsibility for setting direction, managing performance, and supporting the growth of other designers through both success and challenge.
• A proven track record of leading multiple designers and complex problem spaces simultaneously, balancing hands‑on contribution with oversight, prioritisation, and decision‑making.
• Strong experience designing across native apps and web, with an understanding of how experiences need to adapt across platforms while remaining consistent.
• A consistently high bar for visual and interaction design, paired with strong discovery, problem‑framing, and research collaboration skills.
• Strong people leadership skills, including goal setting, feedback, performance conversations, and coaching others through growth, uncertainty, and change.
• The ability to bring clarity to ambiguity, make prioritisation decisions that stick, and help teams focus on work that delivers the 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. We never want to miss out on great candidates, so don’t let our banding put you off reaching out – there’s sometimes flexibility for the right fit!

What you can expect from Yoto

• Flexibility: Hybrid working – expectation of 1 day a week on average in our London office, but you are welcome to come in more than this. Take advantage of our ‘work from anywhere’ policy to work from a different location for up to 6 weeks every year.
• Financial: Receive Income Protection, covering long‑term sickness for up to 2 years and company sick pay that increases with length of service. Life Assurance cover from day one of your service. Workplace Pension offering up to 3% employer contributions, following probation.
• Health & Wellness: Private Medical Insurance via Aviva, or a Wellbeing Allowance to be used for memberships, subscriptions, treatment or therapy. Access to 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) through WeCare and unlimited access to Dental advice and guidance via Toothfairy.
• Time Off: 25 days of holiday per year, plus bank holidays. On top of this, you also receive your birthday off, plus 1 extra day of holiday for every year worked after you hit your 2 year anniversary, up to 5 extra days.
• Helping Families: Variety of family‑friendly leave, including enhanced maternity, paternity, adoption, fertility, pregnancy loss and carers leave.
• People & Planet: Up to 2 volunteer days a year. A Book Allowance of up to £50 a year to contribute to your professional development.
• Fun Perks: You receive your very own Yoto player and starter pack of cards! Regular company socials and celebrations, including our annual YotoFest!

Equity and Diversity

At Yoto, we love creating a world where childhood is rich with discovery and joy. We’re also passionate about building a workplace where everyone can thrive – both professionally and personally. We value flexibility and give our team the freedom to balance life and work in ways that suit them. We’re committed to fostering a safe, diverse, and inclusive environment where all individuals, regardless of their background, feel valued and supported.