Head of product design

albelli Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Head of Product Design

albelli Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

About The Role: At Storio, we Make Joy Unforgettable. The Design team is responsible for ensuring that our digital experience, across all devices, is both usable and desirable, enabling customers to create high-quality, personalised photo products. This team plays a key role in fostering a customer-focused approach within the organisation. The Head of Product Design plays a critical leadership role in driving excellence across our product design practice, ensuring it's grounded in established best practices with a commitment to continuous improvement. You will be equally accountable for the direct line management, coaching, and career development of our Product Designers (6, including Senior and Midweight levels), and for driving continuous improvement in our overall Product Design practice and maturity. You will lead efforts to drive continuous improvement in the Product Design practice, fostering effective collaboration with Product, Engineering, and UXR practices, and empowering your team to contribute to these efforts. This role reports directly to the Director of Product in the Customer Experience domain, which contains all of our customer facing experience Product teams across web, mobile app and desktop app. This role is ideal for a design leader passionate about fostering team growth, design process, discovery process, design systems, and defining standards and accessibility. A key goal for this role will be to further define how P&T approaches the discovery process in collaboration with the Head of UX Research and Head of Product, embedding best practices within your design team and the broader Product and Tech group.

• People Leadership & Development: Direct line management, coaching, and career development of 6 Product Designers (Senior and Midweight). Foster a high‑performing, inclusive, psychologically safe team culture that champions excellence, creativity, innovation, and continuous improvement, while overseeing performance and leading talent acquisition and retention for the design organization.
• Product Design Practice & Operations: Lead meeting cadences, standardise ways of working, ensure effective design crits and maintain optimal design tooling contracts (such as Figma). Guide the team through quarterly product planning, ensuring design capacity is appropriately sized and planned across all product teams.
• Define Key Design Documentation: In collaboration with the Head of UX Research and Head of Product, lead the definition and implementation of a scalable approach to mapping key customer journeys to make customer and commercial risks and opportunities highly visible. Define and maintain insight‑informed design principles that guide customer‑centric decision‑making and ensure their consistent application by the team.
• Co‑Own the Design System: In collaboration with Engineering Principals, co‑own and champion the adoption of the design system, ensuring it is scalable, maintainable, represents best practices, and is used by product teams and the design team. Maintain alignment with the Brand team for visual identity in‑journey use.
• Lead & Evolve the Product Discovery Process: Collaborate with the Head of Product and Head of UX Research to define and evolve the Product Discovery framework for the design team, ensuring consistent, effective discovery practices across all designers and translating insights into actionable solutions.
• Accessibility: Own the timeline and approach to meeting WCAG AA standards, driving and overseeing the Product Design team's adoption and ensuring designers have training and support to meet these benchmarks. Champion inclusive design methods to understand the needs of all customers and optimise usability.
• Provide Thought Leadership: Stay ahead of industry trends, tools, and methodologies to introduce innovative solutions that enhance customer experience, and guide the team in applying these insights. Share findings and advocate for design‑led solutions and user centricity.
• Collaborate with UX Research: Work closely with UX Research to embed usability testing and assessment methods in the Product Design team, ensuring designers include usability testing and insights in design decisions. Upskill designers in foundational UX research techniques for iterative, lightweight research.
• Outcome Measurement: Measure progress towards internal adoption of processes, tools, and standards. Define metrics to track adoption and success of best practices and report outcomes through the Product & Tech Quarterly Business Review.

• Proven People Leadership Experience: Direct line management experience managing Product Designers, including performance management, career development, coaching, mentoring and team building.
• Extensive Design Leadership Experience: Significant senior leadership experience in product design across multiple devices (web, mobile app, desktop app).
• Deep Expertise in Defining and Embedding Design Process: Track record of defining, implementing, and iterating on product design processes and frameworks and scaling them across a team.
• Leading Discovery Methods and Processes: Experience guiding teams in discovery methods and processes (problem framing, impact mapping, early prototyping, collaborative decision making, design sprints).
• Design System Experience: Experience setting up, managing, or evolving a design system and ensuring its adoption and maintenance.
• Accessible User Journeys: Designing accessible journeys, flows, interactions, and interfaces to WCAG AA standards with team adherence.
• Communication & Storytelling: Ability to articulate complex design challenges to diverse audiences and develop your team to do the same.
• Strategic Collaboration: Experience collaborating with Product Management, Engineering, and UX Research in an agile environment to influence product strategy and roadmap.
• Design Capacity Management & Prioritisation: Experience prioritising design work, managing capacity across multiple product teams, and assessing work by risk, impact, and business goals.
• Outcome Measurement: Experience defining and delivering design success metrics and tracking adoption and impact of design practices.
• Service Design Understanding: Experience applying principles to improve end‑to‑end customer journeys.
• Nice to have: Experience in a B2C ecommerce environment; experience with both physical and digital products and integrated user experiences; Jira for planning and task management.

Location: Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands