Lead Interaction and Product Designer

As a Lead Interaction and Product Designer at TPXimpact, you will lead the strategic direction, delivery and growth of our work, helping us on our mission to empower organisations to deliver good design. You’ll creatively solve real problems for real people, progressing our practice positively and developing our shared vision of excellence, whilst creating safe and supportive spaces where people are proud to talk about their work. 

On client projects, you’ll be accountable for delivering outcomes, managing commercial responsibilities and ensuring high standards of work across complex programmes. You’ll represent best practice, working directly with clients to define statements of work, leading multidisciplinary teams to navigate complexity and holding uncertainty on behalf of clients. In DT Design, you’ll work alongside the Head of Practice to assure the quality of design work across the practice, mentor others and contribute to business development and growth activities. 

Dimensions

Key performance indicators for the role

• Individual utilisation: 90%

Problem solving responsibility and complexity

• High, leading project delivery and teams. Accountable for managing significant ambiguity, holding uncertainty on behalf of clients and owning commercial responsibilities on complex projects. 

Internal / External interactions

• Managing delivery and client relationships 

• Lead practice growth (propositions, coaching, internal impact)

• Proactively contribute to business growth (bids, proposals, pitches)

Professional knowledge and experience

Essential experience

• leading high-level product design strategy, framing and propositions across complex programmes of work

• creating environment where good design can happen, successfully navigating ambiguity, changing scope and lower digital maturity 

• championing inclusive design and accessibility, proactively calling out when clients or teams are not adopting existing standards and working with them to improve

• translating design into working software by working alongside developers in technical programmes and proactively reducing design and tech debt

• managing commercial responsibilities on projects, including identifying opportunities for good design and defining team shape to be impactful

• maintaining high standards of work by assuring quality, conducting reviews and providing constructive feedback to other designers

• building capability and skills within internal teams and client organisations, including the line management of senior designers

• communicating key decisions to teams effectively without introducing uncertainty and owning the escalation of project issues to lead teams through blockers

• telling the story of our work and inspiring a design community environment, increasing engagement and knowledge sharing while making space for everyone to contribute equally

• strategically planning and managing time to deliver maximum value to our clients and their users while actively leading and contributing to practice and business growth (bids, proposals, pitches).

Desirable experience

• confidence using co-creation and participatory approaches to foster diverse reach and thinking from users and stakeholders

• developing learning materials for interaction designers and establishing practice-wide governance processes

• Contributing to the public discourse around design via blogging, public speaking or industry events.

Technical skills

• Define, implement and influence the long-term goals and vision of product strategy, working with clients to design and cost programmes of design work.

• Assure the quality of information architecture, micro-interaction and visual design across projects, providing constructive feedback to elevate the work of other designers.

• Direct experimental approaches to prototyping across programmes, guiding teams to applying the right dimensions of fidelity to test ideas and influence strategic decision-making.

• Champion proactive ethical and accessibility standards (WCAG), confidently challenging teams or clients not adopting inclusive practices

• Create, maintain and contribute to complex design systems (GOV.UK, NHS, etc) including embedding robust governance and contribution processes across organisations

• Bridge the gap to technology by conducting code reviews, contribute to code repositories and develop testing plans in collaboration with developers

• Influence and guide how emerging technologies (generative AI, large language models) are applied responsibility to interaction design work

• Own escalations, collaborating effectively with other leaders to resolve complex blockers and manage significant business risks

• Direct the learning and development of others, owning the development of formal training approaches and activities that increase the skills of our teams and clients

• Own and communicate the story of the work, engage senior stakeholders in the value of design and successfully lead multidisciplinary teams as a project director when required.