zeneducate - Zen Educate - Senior E2E Product Designer
Responsibilities
• Own problems end-to-end - from discovery through to shipped product. • Design flows, systems, and interfaces that are simple, scalable, and high-quality. • Stay close to the customer - building a deep understanding of educators, schools, and internal teams, and how they actually work day-to-day. • Build and contribute to our research machine continuously learning through interviews, observation, data, and real product usage. • Turn insight into action shaping problems, validating direction, and informing what gets built (not just justifying decisions after the fact). • Create fast feedback loops - testing ideas early through prototypes, conversations, and live experiments. • Prototype and validate ideas quickly, using modern tools (including AI-assisted ones). • Bring ideas to life beyond static design, exploring interaction, logic, and behaviour in real environments. • Collaborate deeply with engineers and PMs, while increasingly contributing directly to implementation. • Use judgement to balance speed vs quality, shipping early and iterating often. • Synthesize and share learning - building shared understanding across the team, not letting insight sit in silos. • Mentor other designers and contribute to raising the bar across the team. • Shape how we work, as design continues to evolve at Zen. • 🏗 What we’re building • Getting the right educator into the right school at the right time is a nuanced, meaningful problem. • Done well, it improves outcomes for children and puts more money into classrooms (we’ve already saved UK schools over £50 million since 2017). Done poorly, it burns out teachers, wastes money, and disrupts education. • Our platform supports: • Educators finding meaningful work. • Schools managing short- and long-term staffing needs. • Internal teams matching supply and demand efficiently. • We’re well established in the UK and rapidly growing in the US which brings a constant stream of complex, high-impact design challenges across workflows, systems, and experiences.
Benefits
• Who I am and what I am looking for • 👋 Hi, I’m JC, Head of Design at Zen Educate. I started sketching out the first versions of the product on evenings and weekends before we had a team, a logo, or an office. Now, I lead our growing design function as we tackle more complex, ambitious, and impactful problems across both sides of the Atlantic. • I’m looking for a Senior Product Designer who wants to do meaningful work at the intersection of service, system, and interface design. Someone who cares deeply about users, communicates clearly, thinks in flows not screens, and is excited to partner closely with product, engineering, our commercial team and most importantly, our customers, to solve real-world problems in education. • Design at Zen is about shaping problems, navigating ambiguity, collaborating with conviction — and crafting simple, scalable, elegant experiences that make a real difference. • Here’s what we value in our designers: • Clarity over all – clear thinking, clear visuals, clear storytelling • Systems thinking – not just how a screen works, but how it fits into the wider workflow • Craft + impact – quality design isn’t precious, it’s purposeful • Bias to ship – perfection is a direction, not a requirement • Curiosity and candour – great design comes from great questions and honest collaboration • We’re still a small design team, which means you’ll have a lot of room to shape how we work, build design maturity across the org, and leave your fingerprints on a product with deep real-world impact. • What we are building and why • Getting the right teacher into the right school at the right time is a nuanced, meaningful problem. Done well, it improves children’s outcomes and gets more money into classrooms (we’ve already saved UK schools over £30 million since 2017). Done poorly, it burns out teachers, wastes money, and disrupts education. • Our platform helps teachers find meaningful work and schools fill roles efficiently. It supports internal operations teams matching supply and demand, mobile-first experiences for educators, and tools for schools to manage short- and long-term needs. • We’re well established in the UK and rapidly growing in the US — a market that’s similar in spirit but different in all the details. That means complex, fascinating design challenges at every level: workflow UX, service design, visual systems, information architecture, messaging, accessibility, trust, and much more. • Solid, but not flashy compensation. We pay decently, but we won’t beat out companies with deeper pockets (yet!). • Progression = impact. Pay increases come with increased level and scope. We invest in your growth, not just reward it after the fact. • 🤝 Team Culture • Small design team, big ambitions. You won’t get lost in a 50-person design org — and you’ll help define what “great” looks like. • Async and face-to-face collaboration. Iterative sharing, with structured rituals and casual touch points to stay aligned and connected. • Mission-led and user-focused. Our product isn’t a vanity tool or a growth hack. It’s a platform with deep real-world impact. • Still scrappy in places. Not everything is polished or perfectly resourced. If you like clean chaos and building things properly, you’ll thrive. • We aim to hire fast and fairly — clarity over games. Our ideal process is: apply one week, offer the next. Here’s what that looks like: • We’ll check the basics — your availability, compensation expectations, and whether this feels like a mutual fit. • Meeting with me • I’ll want to understand how you work, what matters to you in a design role, and how we can support your best work A deep dive into a past project (or two) will follow. We’ll look for clear storytelling, design thinking, collaboration, and the impact of your work. • Design task session • You’ll work on a real product problem — shaping it, exploring options, and figuring out how you think. • Culture & collaboration chat • You’ll meet a few of the people you’d be working alongside — outside of the product sphere. This is where we get a sense of what it’s like to work at Zen. Expect a relaxed, candid chat about team dynamics, values, and ways of working. • We believe in feedback, but only share it if you ask for it. If you want it, just say so — we’ll be honest and constructive about how we saw things. • Sound exciting? Let’s talk. • If you read all this and thought “hell yes” (even if it’s a slightly nervous one), then please apply. If you skimmed and thought “maybe,” apply anyway — you’ll get a clearer sense once we chat. We’re always open to great people, even if the timing isn’t perfect. • We currently have a clear need for one more Senior Product Designer to join the team — maybe it’s you? • Diversity and Inclusion • At Zen, we strive to build a culture of equity and inclusion, where everyone is respected, valued and appreciated for their unique traits, experiences and perspectives. We are committed to creating a safe, inclusive and equitable environment where our team can thrive, regardless of age, ethnicity, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, disability, religion or beliefs. We value our differences and believe that practices of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion help us create a fairer, more compassionate environment for all. • We welcome applicants with diverse backgrounds and different experiences and perspectives — just like the staff who teach through Zen and the children at the schools we work with. We believe in hiring the best people from the widest pool and creating an inclusive culture where people’s voices are heard and all our team can look forward to coming to work. • We are committed to building a team that reflects the diversity of our community and promoting an equitable and inclusive environment for all. We seek out diverse opinions, beliefs, and experiences because they collectively make us stronger; we’ve had former teachers, pilots, fundraisers, engineers, lawyers, marketers, social media experts and more join our team. • High-level bits to keep in mind 🔍 • Location: Our HQ is based in London (Oval). If you're in and around London, we'd love you to be onsite with our Product Team but also open to speaking with you regardless of where you are in the UK! • Type: Full-time • 🤝 Team Culture • Meeting with me • Design task session
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