Lead Product Designer

Who We Are

Zoopla is a leading UK property website and trusted consumer brand, empowering movers to make better property decisions with over nine million monthly users generating over one billion annual property searches.

Zoopla is more than a property portal. Over 5 million homeowners are subscribers, tracking their property values and providing a pipeline of movers for Zoopla’s customers (estate agents and housebuilders). The business is investing in leveraging its scale and reach to build new, AI-driven experiences that engage movers and unlock value and a strong return on investment for customers.

Our guiding behaviours define how we work together and what we expect from one another. These behaviours are to keep it simple, take ownership, make it better and win together. We strive for progress not perfection and have no doubt that we can achieve our ambitions if we focus on the right things, give it our all and do it together.

About the role

We’re looking for a Lead Product Designer to drive design vision and execution across multiple product areas at Zoopla starting with the future of Search. 

This is a hands-on leadership role with real scope to shape both what we build and how we build it, setting the standard for design quality, strategic thinking and cross-functional alignment. You’ll operate at the intersection of product strategy, user experience and business performance, defining opportunity areas, setting design direction and ensuring our work delivers measurable impact.

You won’t just respond to briefs. You’ll be a key voice in shaping product strategy, influencing prioritisation at a senior level, and championing design as a driver of growth, conversion and long-term customer value.

You’ll balance hands-on design leadership with coaching, strategic input and the development of scalable design practices that elevate the whole team.

What you’ll do

Leadership and Impact

• Set design direction across multiple product areas, ensuring alignment with broader product and business strategy
• Mentor a small group of designers, raising the bar on craft, thinking and execution
• Partner with senior product and engineering leaders to shape roadmaps, define priorities and identify high-value opportunities
• Champion design’s role in driving business outcomes, articulating the value of design investment to senior stakeholders

Designing End-to-End Experience

• Provide hands-on design leadership for the most complex and high-impact initiatives, from problem framing through to delivery and optimisation
• Design and oversee intuitive, high-quality journeys across web and mobile, with a focus on usability, performance and continuity across touchpoints
• Think across the full lifecycle, including onboarding, engagement, retention and reactivation, ensuring experiences connect across journeys, not just within individual features.
• Establish and evolve design patterns that create coherence across the product portfolio

Data, Experimentation and Growth

• Define clear success metrics for your work through measurable outcomes
• Use data, research and behavioural insight to identify opportunities, inform decisions and build the case for investment
• Drive a culture of experimentation, working with Product and Data to test, learn and optimise journeys at scale
• Translate performance data into actionable design improvements, fostering continuous learning across the team

Exploration and Craft

• Look beyond the current roadmap to identify new opportunities that drive customer and business value
• Lead rapid exploration and validation of ideas through prototyping, testing and stakeholder engagement.
• Champion the adoption of modern tools and approaches, including AI-assisted design, to improve speed, quality and innovation across the team
• Evolve the design system and ways of working that improve quality, consistency and speed across the team 

Collaboration & Influence

• Operate as a key design partner to senior product and engineering leadership, shaping strategy and influencing decisions at a senior level
• Facilitate workshops and design sessions that align stakeholders, resolve ambiguity and move complex initiatives forward
• Communicate design vision, rationale and outcomes clearly to stakeholders at all levels, including executive leadership
• Build strong relationships across the organisation, establishing design as a trusted and influential function

What we’re looking for

• Significant experience designing digital products end-to-end in a product-led environment, , with demonstrable leadership of design direction
• Strong strategic product thinking, with the ability to connect design decisions to customer outcomes, business metrics and long-term product vision
• Expertise in user research methodologies and testing, with a track record of using data, experimentation and performance metrics to drive decisions.
• Ability to think in systems, journeys and product ecosystems, not just individual features
• Confident influencing at a senior level across product, engineering and business stakeholders
• Experience facilitating workshops and strategic alignment sessions
• Strong perspective on emerging technologies (including AI) and how they can transform customer experience, decision-making and product capability
• Proficiency in design tools such as Figma or similar, and can adapt your approach to the needs of the project.

The kind of designer who thrives here

• You think strategically and take a long-term view, spotting patterns and opportunities across the product landscape
• You lead by example; setting the standard for quality, ownership and accountability from problem through to measurable outcome
• You’re deeply curious about how products perform and how design can compound value over time
• You understand how design contributes to business success and can articulate that value to senior stakeholders
• You’re proactive, adaptable and comfortable working in a fast-moving environment
• You elevate those around you, through mentoring, coaching and creating the conditions for others to do their best work

Where You’ll Be

At Zoopla we embrace hybrid working but emphasise the importance of also spending time together. You’ll have the opportunity to work remotely (at home) for two days per week with Mondays and Thursdays as all-Zoopla days in the office together plus a third in-office day of your choosing. 

Our home in Tower Bridge is a wonderful hub for collaborative and individual working, with space to socialise and exercise. On our doorstep you’ll find buzzing Borough, Bankside and Bermondsey, not to mention soaring river views.