Senior Retail Product Designer

About the role

As a Partner in Retail, you’re accountable for retail excellence with a relentless connection to customers and shops alike, dedicated support for today's demands, and visionary strides to shape, optimise, and revolutionise the future of retail.
Rooted in adaptability, driven by a continuous improvement mindset, and fueled by a commitment to getting it right the first time, our Retail Support Teams are the dynamic force steering a thriving and innovative retail ecosystem of John Lewis Partnership.

As a Senior Retail Product Designer you’ll be part of a cross-functional Strategy and design team, leading the design that services both our strategy and product teams.

You will be responsible for the entire Product Design lifecycle from initial discovery & vision setting, through to the execution of final UI designs.

• Salary
  : £52,000-£80,000
• Contract type
  :
  Permanent
• Working pattern/flexible working
  :
  The Partnership has adopted a hybrid working approach, meaning you'll be able to work a mixture between the office and home based upon your personal needs whilst balancing the needs of the business. Alongside this we have also signalled a clear intent for Central teams to work ‘more in person than not’ hybrid way of working. For the Waitrose Innovation and change team ,this means 2-3 days a week of in-person time but it is not a hard and fast rule requiring everyone to be in the office 3 days a week.
  
  Supplier visits, time in our shops and time in the office all contribute to this requirement.
• Location
  :
  Bracknell

Lead design for retail’s product areas, driving the future vision and ensuring it complements a cohesive overall Waitrose experience. Work in a cross‑functional team, responsible for all design artefacts from initial discovery, user journey mapping to final UI design details. Deeply understand the customers you’re designing for through research, data, and analysis to build the right solutions. Collaborate regularly using strong communication, documentation and facilitation skills with Product Owners, Engineers, Data Scientists and User Researchers.

Execute polished, intuitive and accessible user experiences, balancing ideal experience with pragmatic trade‑offs based on technical constraints, experimentation strategy or business risk.

• Experience working as part of a Product Team in an agile environment.
• Experience working through the Product Design lifecycle from discovery/resourcing through to final UI design, backed by a portfolio that showcases this work.
• Agile scrum experience: working in sprints with backlogs and feature sets.
• Ability to think at a high level about product strategy and clearly articulate design decisions.
• Understanding of the technical implications of design decisions.
• Passion for problem solving and UX Design.
• Excellent communication skills and a people‑focused design mentality to help set up frameworks and brainstorm initial design concepts.

• Retail ecommerce experience within a large organisation.
• Experience working with modern design tools like Figma.
• Experience in front‑end programming and the ability to code simple prototypes.
• Experience in designing and maintaining cross‑platform design systems.
• Experience conducting research.

It’s important to note that some of our roles are subject to pre‑employment vetting (including DBS checks for successful candidates). If required you’ll be informed and provided with information about vetting during the recruitment process and we encourage you to complete any vetting documents quickly to avoid delays. Any DBS checks required will be carried out by a third‑party registered body and financial probity checks may also be required for some roles.

We want all of our Partners to have a good work‑life balance and we support flexible working. This might mean flexible or compressed hours, job sharing or shorter hour contracts, where possible. Please discuss this further with the hiring manager during your interview.