Lead Product Designer

About the role

This role is the design owner for a specific product domain inside one of the fastest-growing PropTech companies in the UK. The hire sets the strategic design vision and translates high-level roadmap direction into detailed, cross-cutting design solutions. You will define craft standards, own patterns, and raise the quality of design output across the team. This position operates at a senior IC level with significant autonomy and judgment over what gets built. You will drive AI thinking in both your workflow and user-facing features, balancing innovation with practical value. The role is suited to someone who is tired of feature factories and ready to define what matters instead of simply executing.

Key facts

What you'll do

Drive the design vision and execution for a product domain, turning ambiguous strategic direction into coherent, cross-functional design work.

Set the craft bar for design quality through your own output, using your shipped work as the reference for what good looks like.

Own cross-cutting design problems, including patterns, flows, and the overall coherence of the domain experience.

Mentor and elevate the designers around you through critique, pairing, and modeling excellent design practices.

Drive AI thinking strategically, both in your own workflow and in user-facing features, and decide when AI adds real value.

Operate as a strategic design partner in roadmap conversations, engaging equally with product and engineering leadership.

Validate concepts quickly by spinning up calls and prototypes to test assumptions with real users.

Define success measures upfront for design work and evaluate outcomes against those measures after release.

Make design trade-offs informed by commercial realities, including retention, cost, and build complexity.

Move at pace on strategic initiatives, testing ideas through shipping rather than treating strategy as a slower, separate track.

Use customer feedback, support data, and metrics to inform decisions and iterate based on evidence.

Identify opportunities where design can solve complex business problems and elevate UK estate agency through technology.

Collaborate closely with product and engineering partners to ensure design solutions are feasible and aligned with constraints.

Continuously look for ways to improve the design process, tools, and outcomes for the entire domain you own.

Requirements

You have roughly 8+ years of Product or UX Design experience, with a track record at senior IC level in SaaS or complex products.

You operate at a strategic level and are comfortable defining what to build, not just how to build it.

You are commercially fluent and make design decisions informed by how products generate revenue or create cost.

You can point to specific design work where you defined success metrics upfront and evaluated results after release.

You have strong opinions on AI in product design and can explain when it is the right solution and when it is a gimmick.

You move quickly on strategic work and test hypotheses by shipping, rather than treating strategy as a separate, slower track.

You are comfortable making trade-offs between user experience, business value, and engineering effort.

You expect to be given ownership and outcomes, not just tasks or briefs.

Nice to have

Experience leading design in PropTech or regulated industries where clarity and trust are critical.

Background working with data, analytics, and experimentation to validate design decisions.

Experience mentoring designers and raising the quality of design critique within a team.

Practical notes

This is a full-time role based in Manchester with hybrid flexibility, allowing up to 4 days per week of remote work.

The position reports compensation in the range of £70,000 to £90,000, which is negotiable based on experience.

No specific visa or travel requirements are stated in the source information.

The role is senior in scope and requires a high degree of autonomy, judgment, and ownership of design outcomes.