Product Design Manager

Spotlight Sports Group
This is a hybrid role (remote and London office) – you will need to come into the London office at least once a week.

The role:

We have a great role for someone who enjoys sport and can get into sports data, especially if they like horseracing. We are looking for a Digital Product Design Manager to work primarily on our Racing Post brand, along with other products focused around UK/Euro sports like football, rugby, tennis and more. We have just gone through a long digital transformation process, and the first generation products from the process are about to be released on the market. Now is a great time for someone to come in and help us push our innovation forward to not only celebrate our content and data with customers who love our brands already, but help attract and engage new audiences.

This Product Design Manager role oversees design and implementation of most Racing Post products for our B2C customers along with our B2B retail and media partners. You will oversee work on everything from websites and mobile apps, to larger interactive displays, kiosks and video displays. You will work closely with Product Management and Research to form and execute the product strategy for those business lines, championing the customer and their needs throughout the process. You ll work closely with Development to ensure design solutions are feasible and can be built to the budget. You will work with the Director of Product Design and Research to help shape design strategy, improve ways of working, and recommend / optimise the tools the design team s use. You will also work closely with the Product Design Manager for Affiliates and US Sports to optimise ways of sharing assets, methods and approaches with the goal of improving efficiencies across the department. This role will be a mix of management and hands on – the ratio will tip more towards management as the team grows.

We are looking for a true UX/UI hybrid senior level product designer who has some management experience to help lead and manage a team of 4-5 other designers (this may grow through next year). We re looking for someone highly collaborative, yet owns their decisions; who has an interest in managing a team and also a desire to mentor, inspire and develop those team members.

Aspects of this role also include:

• Owning the overall user experience for the product line(s) you are managing – a mix of strategic and tactical oversight end-to-end, ensuring user needs are identified and solved for, within constraints, using research and/or analytics to back rationale behind design decisions wherever possible.
• Working closely with the Heads of Product to build roadmaps and execute user-centric products feature designs and flows, including designating feature options to test.
• Regularly collaborating, sharing and reviewing design work your product design unit produces with other Product Design & Research Leads / Managers to help identify areas that need alignment or could benefit from knowledge sharing or design / research related efficiencies.
• Managing day to day stakeholder relationships for your product line(s) and providing introductions, guidance and support to more junior members of the team as needed.
• Line managing, developing and mentoring UX and Product Designers within your team.
• Constructing product designs and prototypes for usability testing and, later, delivery to dev.
• Working closely with Research, Analytics, and Marketing to better understand our market and current customer needs.
• Evangelising the merits of good design and qualitative research – champions user needs at all levels and influences stakeholders to consider those needs in their objectives
• Actively works on possessing a great knowledge base of how the business of Racing Post / SSG works – becomes familiar with all of the major content and money generation centres and how they work together.
• Maintains excellent relationships with correlating departments including Marketing, Analytics, Tech, Product, and Editorial.

Experience:

• Significant industry experience (e-commerce in particular) designing and delivering design solutions for complex digital products in a precise and efficient manner for a predominantly client-side, high-volume B2C/B2B UX, UI or Product Design role, preferably at companies working in news, high-volume data and/or complex e-commerce or apps.
• Experience working in sports, sports data, betting or similar industries is a big plus. An overall passion / interest in sports will go a long way.
• Experience designing engaging and successful products for responsive web and native IOS and/or Android platforms – knowing the possibility and limitations of those platforms – is crucial for this role. (Experience with REACT, or kiosk / interactive display design, a very big plus)
• Experience managing a team of designers with a proven track record of encouraging top performance and engagement from their teams.
• Experience evangelising benefits of user experience and design processes for creating more customer focused, effective products and business outcomes.
• Experience working with Product Managers and stakeholders to influence product roadmaps and objectives to ensure user needs are considered along with business needs.
• Extensive experience collaborating with Delivery and Development on how to design and deliver product solutions within a hybrid-Agile environment, on time and on budget.
• Highly effective experience in influencing and advocating for the user/customer to non-design/digital design audiences, such as Product, Marketing, Editorial or Technology Managers
• Proficient at selling and defending Product Design work and processes to stakeholders.
• Experience leading, presenting or facilitating discovery design workshops and/or working within design sprints (not the same as scrum dev sprints).

Requirements:

• Exceptional hard design skills and experience in Figma (preferred), Sketch / Zeplin, and at least one complex prototyping tool (e.g. Protopie)
• Knowledgeable and skilled in packaging up designs for dev and working within a hybrid-Agile environment (e.g. being involved in refinement sessions and UAT processes)
• Knowledge and experience around designing for responsive web and mobile apps – knowing the possibility and limitations of the platforms, especially around interaction design patterns and features that can affect performance.
• Can put together detailed plans of how to schedule and execute design deliverables for (their) product team in line with the Product roadmap and current business priorities.
• Possesses excellent UX Design knowledge and of leading different UX Design processes, methodologies and techniques.
• Have an excellent understanding of what makes a sound and robust UX Design methodology, common pitfalls and best practices.
• Constructs well researched, validated or supported hypotheses to user problems.
• An exceptional understanding of the different data types you can use to inform hypotheses or validate solutions depending on context.
• Understands basic tenets of accessibility and when/if they are appropriate to apply to SSG s digital products depending on their audience or market.
• Can build and execute wireframes and prototypes for presentation and usability testing in the latest industry standard tools; can hand off design deliverables to UI Designers, Research and dev in formats they are able to work with.
• Is a skilled manager who knows how to develop talent, support their team members and address performance issues quickly and effectively.
• Can defend work effectively, knows how to retrieve actionable feedback, and takes onboard relevant feedback in an objective manner; mentors other UX designers on how to do these effectively as well.
• A good understanding of online product design in the betting and sports news industries.
• Is cognizant of what other departments (Marketing, Analytics, Product Management, Research, Development) do and what their goals are – how that affects Product Design goals and output.

We are looking for people who share an affinity for our values:

• Trust is Everything
• We are One Team
• We are Focused but Flexible
• Our goal is Excellence

If you feel aligned to these values, we would love to hear from you.

Spotlight Sports Group recognises the value of employing people from a range of different backgrounds who come with a variety of experience, views and opinions. Please let us know if you require any flexibility or adjustments to enable your application.

Benefits:

The position will come with a competitive salary, bonus, 25 days holiday, Private Healthcare and a great pension. We also give you your birthday off. We think we have an amazing working environment and culture and hope you will do too.

-UK:

• Private Medical
• Pension
• Life Assurance
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays + your birthday off
• Cycle to work scheme
• Hybrid and remote working

USA:

• 13 days annual leave (plus 12 full non-working days and 2 half days)
• Healthcare contribution and 401K
• We also give you your birthday off
• Fully remote working

3 stage interview process including a task.Figma, Sketch, Wireframing, Prototyping, ManagementFigma, Sketch, Wireframing, Prototyping, UI/UX