Head of Product Design: Helsinki

Head of Product Design: Helsinki

Leading the digital product design capability for our office in Helsinki, you will impact the end customer experience of over 31 million Zalando customers. Your teams will help increase circularity and sustainability in fashion, help brand partners tell their stories, build a better new-customer experience, and connect consumers to local retail stores via the Zalando platform.

This position is within our Digital Experience business unit and reports to the Director of Product Design. You will head up design for "Customer Acquisition and Engagement". For this area, you will hire (mid-term) one or two designers to join you in Helsinki and lead one Designer Manager with a team of four (growing to 6 mid-term, ca. 12 long-term) in Berlin. In addition, you will manage and grow 2 small teams of digital product designers located in Helsinki who are embedded in new business ventures. One team (currently 2 designers) focuses on defining the future of brick-and-mortar stores. The other (also currently 2 designers) is shaping the future of buying and selling pre-loved fashion.

WHERE YOUR EXPERTISE IS NEEDED

As the Head of Design for Zalando's Helsinki office, you will work with interdisciplinary leadership teams focused on creating coherent strategies to tackle four main Zalando areas.

The work will include:

• Defining and designing how society can be more sustainable by buying and selling pre-loved fashion and leading teams to achieve the vision.
  
  
• Defining and designing how to create the future of brick-and-mortar stores succeeding with a hybrid online/offline model and leading teams to achieve the vision
• Defining the best new customer experience people have with Zalando
  
  
• Defining how brands tell their stories and connect with Zalando customers that share their values
  
  
• Help design a state-of-the-art content personalization system so customers feel like Zalando knows them well and the vast assortment of fashion isn't so overwhelming
  
  
• Grow the Helsinki site's design maturity
• Grow 9 designers in their design careers
  
  

Your work with the Helsinki Recommerce team on defining and designing buying and selling pre-loved fashion will has a huge potential to drive towards our sustainability goals. You would guide the work on integrating the pre-owned fashion experience into the main Zalando site and apps, and help scale the stand-alone Zalando recommerce app and web shops.

Your work with the Connected Retail team will enable brick-and-mortar stores to define their future model of offline and online sales with the Zalando platform. Recently for example, the team majorly helped brick-and-mortar stores stay afloat with the Zalando network during the Corvid-19 restrictions.

Finally, you'll work on helping 31 million Zalando customers express themselves through their fashion choices through the team that creates the inspiring content that customers see tailored to their individual tastes. This team focuses on creating inspiring and engaging content that helps customers feel like Zalando knows them like a fashion-savvy friend. It helps customers explore the vast assortment of Zalando because you create the system that tailors it to their preferences. You'll particularly work with content teams, personalization teams, brand partners, marketing teams, and other parties creating relevant content for everyone.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• Experience: You are a very seasoned design professional. You have likely led larger teams before, but you are inspired to dive deep again and solve truly meaningful problems that make customers feel like we understand them. To land this job, you will show and explain raw artefacts from your work defining product design strategy, executing tactically in a complex environment and leading people to perform at their best.
• Empathy: You have the mindset and methodologies to understand your customers, colleagues and employees.
• Craft: You understand service design, choreograph UX design processes and orchestrate unified experiences across devices and throughout the customer journey - while knowing how to embody specific solutions in usable and delightful interactions.
• Experimentation: You have a generative approach, strive to solve problems in the best way possible through iteration, and are willing to kill your darlings.
• Storytelling: You bring not just users but also stakeholders and employees on a journey of increasing intimacy by explaining a clear customer experience vision and telling compelling tales.

BENEFITS
Inspiring peers. You will join a leadership circle boasting over a dozen seasoned design managers across Zalando.

Empowering culture. We value trust and have a bias for action. We are kind to each other. For us respect means challenging each other and giving direct feedback. We share ideas freely. We learn from mistakes. We laugh a lot.

Professional development. We help you to grow through mentoring, personal branding support, networking both inside and outside the company, and rotation through diverse career opportunities within Zalando.

Perks. Competitive salary; great shopping discount on a wide range of products on Zalando; discounts from external partners; office in the heart of Berlin; public transport discounts; relocation assistance for internationals; municipality services; flexible working times; family service and parent & child rooms; and volunteering time off; diverse sports and health offerings.
ABOUT ZALANDO
Zalando is Europe's leading online platform for fashion, connecting customers, brands and partners across 17 markets. We drive digital solutions for fashion, logistics, advertising and research, bringing head-to-toe fashion to more than 23 million active customers through diverse skill-sets, interests and languages our teams choose to use.

We celebrate diversity and are committed to building teams that represent a variety of backgrounds, perspectives and skills. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit and business need.

Please note that all applications must be completed using the online form and submitted in English - we do not accept applications via e-mail.