Design Lead, Digital Publishing

Condé Nast is a global media company producing the highest quality content with a footprint of more than 1 billion consumers in 32 territories through print, digital, video and social platforms. The company’s portfolio includes many of the world’s most respected and influential media properties including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Self, GQ, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler/Traveller, Allure, AD, Bon Appétit and Wired, among others. Condé Nast Entertainment was launched in 2011 to develop film, television and premium digital video programming. Job Description Location: London, GB Condé Nast is a global media company, home to iconic brands including Vogue, GQ, Glamour, AD, Vanity Fair and Wired, among many others. Our award-winning content reaches 84 million consumers in print, 367 million in digital and 379 million across social platforms, and generates more than 1 billion video views each month. We are headquartered in London and New York, and operate in 31 markets worldwide, including China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico & Latin America, Spain, Taiwan, the U.K. and the U.S., with local licence partners across the globe. The Role The Condé Nast Global Media Platform powers our network of over 65 websites, 5,000 editors, and hundreds of millions of monthly visitors and digital revenue dollars. Our teams create the software and technologies that make this possible; spanning from a robust multi-brand design system and web framework, to CMS and other publishing products, to user accounts and subscription journeys, to robust ads and commerce products. We are looking for an experienced product design leader to partner with our product and engineering orgs to execute the strategy, user experience, and visual design across the Experience Platform teams. You’ll join at an ideal time to make a big impact in the focus areas of self service, user autonomy and smart publishing. The Experience Platform also enables Condé Nast's world-leading brands to connect directly with the people passionate about the topics they cover, creating new engagement and community experiences on our own sites and apps. The Team We are a team of experienced designers with expertise in customer experience and product design, brand identity, visual design, UX content design, and research. We believe that a well-formed design culture is essential to delivering excellent products. Our mission in Global Product & Technology (GPT) is to empower our brands for business and creative success by creating the next-generation suite of content publishing, membership and commerce experiences. We are a group of product managers, designers, engineers, strategists, and researchers dedicated to building innovative, user-centric products. You will be working alongside international colleagues across the world, working with stakeholders in our US and UK HQs as well as within our 10 other markets. We strongly emphasise cross-functional working through partnering directly with our functional pillars in GPT for Product, Engineering, Architecture, Design, UX, and Delivery; as well as our business partners in Consumer Marketing, Commerce, Commercial and Licensing, Editorial, and Data. What will you be doing?

• Drive clarity in undefined, yet complex problem spaces; balance contributing individual work and setting direction for other designers
• Manage 1-2 product designers on your team, directing and facilitating their day-to-day work and supporting their career development with the support of the larger design organisation
• Develop and drive the process and approach for tackling a problem and creating successful solutions
• Support high-level product strategy, ensuring we’re asking the right questions and solving for distinct user and business needs
• Partner with the team’s product manager, as well as project and tech leads, to bring ideas from early stages to well-defined, actionable projects
• Partner with our UX researchers and UX writers to understand and communicate user behaviours and complex user journeys
• Create user flows, prototypes, and production-ready visual designs for tools that our brand teams use to create digital experiences, cover live events, publish compelling content, syndicate articles, track data, and much more.
• Collaborate with engineers in multiple locations, on implementing the features you and your team design, and ensure the visual and user experience quality of our output
• Represent your team’s work to leadership and other teams at the company
• Use and contribute to our design system, Verso
• Provide thoughtful feedback, mentoring and coaching more junior designers through problem solving
• Active participant on the design and brand leadership teams, setting the tone and shaping our organisational culture while evangelising the value of user experience design, research, and writing

Who you are:

• A portfolio that shows a wealth of clear UX solutions, strong visual design, and the ability to make sense of complex workflows
• Fluency in Content Management Systems, creating WYSIWYG tools, editorial design, multi brand design systems, all driven by product and design principles
• Experience enabling complex tools and capabilities for business-facing software
• Experience leading and shipping large web and mobile products with a content publishing focus, and managing designers within a product development context
• Experience applying shared design patterns and systems to pragmatically solve new and complex user problems
• Familiarity and experience with hypothesis-driven design as well as qualitative and quantitative testing; a data-driven mindset
• Established approach to framing and solving hard problems and a rich understanding of a range of design and research tools and methods
• Experience with current web technology capabilities and limitations (html/css/modern web frameworks)
• Confident and enthusiastic collaborator and communicator
• Experience managing senior stakeholders and their expectations across departments
• Experience with, or a desire to learn how to work within a globally distributed team

What we’d like to see:

• Experience with creating and evolving dynamic publishing tools that are utilised by multiple brands and teams within a globalised company.
• Examples of tooling optimisation, evolution and improvement backed up with clear KPI’s and ROI
• Knowledge of a wide range of UI patterns and the reasons for applying one vs another
• How you’ve designed clear and thoughtful UI and microinteractions
• Your process for problem-solving (rather than just polished, final design work)
• Varying types of design artifacts, and your sensibility of which design exercises meet a particular purpose
• Coding ability is not a requirement, but welcome and encouraged – comfort dealing with low-level system capabilities and the ability to participate in technical discussions are invaluable for this role

Where will you be?

• We encourage hybrid working but when you are in the office, this role will be primarily based in the wonderful Adelphi building with breathtaking views over the Thames and next to the hustle and bustle of The Strand. This is our London HQ and where members of our global teams sit enabling all of our award-winning content to be created.

What benefits do we offer?

• Condé Nast Learning Hub where you’ll find you’ll find all Condé Nast-developed learning courses and trainings, and over 16,000+ courses in seven local languages
• 25 days holiday and extra days of annual leave for if you get married, move house or want to volunteer
• Hybrid working and core hours
• Competitive pension scheme
• Bupa Private Healthcare
• Season ticket loans
• Cycle to work
• Employee Assistance programme
• Bring your dog to work

What happens next? If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply below, and we will review your application as soon as possible. You can update your resume or upload a cover letter at any time by accessing your candidate profile. Condé Nast is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, familial status and other legally protected characteristics.