Product Designer

Product design at Taylor and Francis is a creative and strategic discipline that shapes our platforms and user experiences. As a Product Designer reporting to the Head of Product Design, you'll own end-to-end design from problem discovery to production-ready solutions serving millions of users, working as a genuine partner to Product Managers and customers. This role goes beyond traditional UX design, you'll bring product thinking to design and design thinking to product, understanding both why and how something should be built. You'll actively use research, data, and direct customer contact throughout your design process, while holding the design bar for your domain with confidence and craft.

Discovery & Problem Shaping
You are a participant in discovery not a recipient of its outputs. You will help define what 
problem is worth solving and shape how the team investigates it.

• Engage directly with customers and users conducting your own qualitative research, synthesising behavioural signals, and bringing a designer's eye to what people need versus what they say they want.
• Partner with the UX Researcher to design research studies and translate findings into design implications not just observations.
• Contribute to problem framing and opportunity definition alongside the Product Managers, using design tools journey maps, service blueprints, experience principles to make abstract problems concrete and actionable.
• Identify the moments in the user journey that matter most and advocate for the design investment that those moments deserve.
• Bring a point of view to prioritisation conversations, not just on what would be best to design, but on what the user cost of not designing it well would be.

Design Craft & Execution
You hold the standard for design quality. From early exploration to final delivery, everything 
that ships should reflect considered, intentional design.

• Lead the design process end-to-end from rough conceptual sketches through wireframes, interaction design, and high-fidelity production-ready output.
• Generate multiple design directions for significant problems before converging resisting the pull toward the first adequate solution and exploring the space with genuine creative curiosity.
• Design interactions that are not just usable but genuinely well-considered attending to the detail of motion, feedback, state, error handling, and edge cases that separate good design from great design.
• Build and test prototypes at the fidelity the question demands low fidelity to test concepts quickly, high-fidelity to validate the details before build.
• Work with the product team to understand the full range of scenarios, edge cases, and business rules that your designs need to accommodate ensuring nothing is left to interpretation in engineering.

Research-Informed Design
Strong design at T&F is built on genuine user understanding. You will be an active generator 
of insight, not just a consumer of it.

• Run lightweight, focused research as a natural part of your design process concept testing, usability sessions, preference studies without waiting for a formal research sprint.
• Synthesise research findings, NPS data, behavioural analytics, and customer intelligence into design decisions that are clearly evidenced and easy for others to understand.
• Know when your assumptions need testing and build the test, do not let designs go to engineering without having validated the core user-facing assumptions.
• Maintain a working knowledge of how users behave across your domain through regular exposure to data, session recordings, and direct customer contact.

Cross-Functional Partnership
The best experiences at T&F come from tight collaboration across design, product, 
engineering, and data. You invest in those relationships.

• Work with engineering from early in the design process involving them in problem exploration, getting technical input before designs are finalised, and ensuring implementation intent is understood.
• Partner with the PM to shape what gets built not just how it looks. Your voice should be present in roadmap conversations, trade-off discussions, and success metric definitions.
• Collaborate with the Data & Intelligence team to understand how personalisation, recommendations, and data-driven features can be expressed through design in ways that feel useful rather than intrusive.
• Work with the BA to ensure design intent is fully captured in requirements that acceptance criteria reflect the experience, not just the function