Product Design Lead

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.

Job Description

Location:

London, GB

Condé Nast thrives on collaboration, and our teams come together in the office four days a week (Monday - Thursday).

We value diversity of background, views and cultures. We celebrate people for their personal qualities, skills and contributions, recognising the power our brands have to influence and shape culture.

The Opportunity

Vogue is one of the most influential brands in fashion and culture. Bringing that authority to life online - across inspiration, service, and shopping - at the level of taste, craft, and precision the brand demands, is one of the most exciting design challenges in digital today.

We're looking for a Product Design Lead who sits at the intersection of system and story: someone who can take what we've built and make it measurably better, through focus, craft, and an instinct for what "great" actually looks like. This is a senior IC role. You'll work with real autonomy, move at pace, and make a tangible difference to the experience of millions of readers.

But this isn't just an execution role. We're in a period of deliberate transformation - in how we build, how we design, and how we use new tools and technology to raise our bar. We need someone who is part of how we move forward: a change agent who brings conviction, curiosity, and craft in equal measure.

What you'll be doing.

Elevating visual qualityYou own the visual standard of Vogue's digital experience - ensuring every layout, interaction, and detail feels deliberate, considered, and unmistakably right for the brand. You bring a sophisticated eye for typography, hierarchy, rhythm, and composition, and you know the difference between work that functions well and work that genuinely feels great.

Interrogating the brief, not just answeringitYou ask "why this?" before "how." You connect feature work to the wider reader experience, identify gaps that others miss, elevate the ambition of the work beyond the initial ask and identify opportunities to better integrate revenue-generating experiences without compromising brand integrity. You're comfortable pushing back on a brief when the framing isn't right, and proposing a better one.

Designing with and within systemsYou champion design excellence within the parameters of a shared system, while knowing exactly where to push beyond it. You balance brand expression with scalability — ensuring component use remains consistent and purposeful, while creating the moments of distinctiveness that make Vogue feel like itself online.

Knowing your reader, deeply You dig into data and research to understand what Vogue readers actually do, need, and feel — not just what they say. You run your own lightweight research and usability testing to pressure-test ideas and prototypes, and you partner closely with our UX Research and Analytics specialists to go deeper where it matters. You bring this understanding into every design decision, and you're as comfortable in a research debrief as you are in a design review.

Closing the gap between design and delivery You work closely with engineering at the implementation layer, not just handing off, but staying close to ensure design intent carries through to production. You're fluent in design tokens, comfortable reading a pull request, and use Figma and GitHub as tools of genuine collaboration, not just artifact management.

Using AI as part of your practiceYou use AI tools as a working part of how you design, for rapid prototyping, generative exploration, and closing the gap between concept and execution. You're not waiting to see what best practice looks like; you're helping to define it.

Owning outcomes, not just outputsYou treat the experiences you design as products, not deliverables. You track how your work performs, using reader data, analytics, and qualitative feedback to identify what to improve next. You operate with a strong sense of accountability for the quality of what ships.

Partnering across disciplines You build trusted relationships across design, editorial, product, engineering, commercial and partnerships teams. You speak the language of Creative Directors and engineers with equal fluency, and you translate editorial and creative ambition as well as business opportunities, into actionable design improvements that actually get built.

Championing design cultureYou model craft, curiosity, and clarity through your work. You set the standard for what "good" looks like, mentor through example, and help raise the collective bar — not just within your team, but across the wider design organisation.

You'll thrive in this role if…

• You have a genuine love for editorial design and storytelling — you feel the difference between a reading experience that sings and one that merely works

• You move easily between system and brand thinking, knowing where shared components create coherence and where a brand's voice warrants something purpose-built

• You're someone who interrogates briefs, questions assumptions, and brings a point of view — not just someone who executes what's asked

• You're technically fluent: comfortable in Figma, Cursor / Claude and GitHub, familiar with design tokens and front-end constraints, and able to engage engineers at the implementation level

• You've already changed how you work because of AI tools, and you're curious about what changes next

• You're outcome-oriented — you care about how the work performs, not just how it looks in a review

• You're a strong communicator: direct, open, and as comfortable receiving feedback as giving it

• You're a self-starter who doesn't need the path fully defined to move with confidence

What success looks like...

In your first six months, you'll have made a measurable improvement to the quality of Vogue’s digital experience - something tangible that the team and the brand can point to. You'll have built the cross-functional trust needed to keep pushing: with product, engineering, editorial and business. You'll have a clear picture of what the next phase of Vogue's product experience should look like and why, and you'll have started to introduce new ways of working — including AI-assisted methods — that raise the pace and quality of the team's output.

By the end of your first year, that improvement will be visible in the metrics that matter: quality, engagement, loyalty and conversion. You'll have a considered, well-grounded point of view on the long-term direction of Vogue's digital experience, and the relationships to advocate for it. The new ways of working you introduced will be embedded - not experiments, but how the team operates.

What we'd like to see

We're looking for evidence that you can apply design craft, judgement, and systems thinking to real publishing experiences. Your portfolio should show:

• Editorial and content-led design - examples of designing for storytelling, hierarchy, and content-rich journeys, ideally within digital publishing or media

• Translating inspiration into action - You design experiences that move users from inspiration to decision - shaping how audiences discover, interpret, and act on style through seamlessly integrated editorial, service and commerce moments.

• Experience: 5+ years in product or editorial design roles.

• Brand sensitivity within systems - how you interpret and express a brand identity within shared frameworks, and where you've pushed beyond them

• Motion and interaction - how you design for time: transitions, scroll behaviour, feedback states, and micro-interactions that make reading and navigating feel effortless

• System fluency - how you've refined or extended design systems, component libraries, or token configurations to elevate quality

• Implementation quality - evidence that your design intent carried through to production; how you worked with engineers or used tools (Figma, configs, tokens) to protect fidelity

• Visual judgement - confident hierarchy, rhythm, composition, and a clear point of view on what "great" looks like online

• Curiosity and progression - signs that you stay current, experiment with new tools and technologies (including AI), and push your craft forward

About Condé Nast Technology

Condé Nast Technology builds the products, systems, and experiences that power our brands - from Vogue and The New Yorker to GQ, Wired, and Vanity Fair. Our mission is to enable creativity and business growth through next-generation publishing, loyalty, and commerce platforms.

We're a global team of designers, engineers, product managers, and researchers, working across London, New York, and twelve other markets. We believe that a well-formed design culture is essential to delivering excellent products — and we're actively investing in building one.

Does this sound like you?

Please submit your CV and cover letter/portfolio, which highlights why you'd love to take on this role and why you're a great match for what we're looking for.

We value the time and effort behind every application. All submissions are reviewed by a member of our talent team - we don’t use AI-assisted technology to review applications.  

What benefits do we offer? 

• 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) and extra days of annual leave if you move house or want to volunteer. 

• You’ll have access to a competitive pension scheme, Bupa Private Healthcare, Season ticket loans and eye tests.

• We offer a range of tools to support your wellbeing, including core hours, 10 remote days (from home or a country with a Condé Nast office location), access to our Employee Assistance Programme, corporate gym membership and cycle to work scheme.

• We’re a dog-friendly office, plus you’ll enjoy discounts and magazine subscriptions, keeping you up to date with all things Condé Nast.

• We encourage personal and professional growth through the Condé Nast Learning Hub, where you’ll find an extensive portfolio of learning courses and training available in local languages.

• OurEmployee Resource Groups provide a platform for employees to identify shared objectives, exchange ideas, and work on community priorities for our global workforce. 

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.