Principal Product Designer

Trainline is an innovative, tech business with a mission to bring together the world’s rail, coach and other travel services into one simple experience. We aim to make travel easier and more accessible, encouraging people to make more environmentally sustainable travel choices. We’re hugely proud to be the world’s leading independent rail and coach travel platform and rank among the highest-rated travel and ticketing apps globally. Today, we offer our customers travel to thousands of destinations in and across 45 countries in Europe and beyond. That’s more than £3.7 billion in ticket sales annually, and over 90 million visits to our apps and websites each month. In another major milestone, Trainline listed on the London Stock Exchange in June 2019 and is now part of the FTSE 250.

 

Our culture is central to our success. We’re driven to sustain our phenomenal growth from recent years, and this means we’re always working closely and collaboratively to turn our ideas into reality. It’s this sense of pace, innovating and improving pretty much everything we do, that makes Trainline so exciting and unique - we truly believe our work has a genuine impact and will change travel for the better.

 

Empowering people to make greener travel choices is central to our focus in 2021 and beyond. And it’s the unique blend of innovation, creativity, technology and customer-first experiences we’ve developed that are the core principles to our world class Design team. Led by Will Barker, our new Design Director (an industry authority in the Tech design community), the team are laser focused on building the world’s #1 rail platform benefiting our communities and our world by reducing congestion and our collective carbon footprint - we believe our work has a genuine impact and will change travel for the better.

 

As Principal Product Designer, you’ll lead our growing UX team in our Paris office focused on exploring the French and European travel market to better understand travel behaviours, emotions and attitudes to build differentiated and compelling product experiences. You’ll work closely with design and leadership teams in both Paris and London to ensure Trainline’s European growth is centered around a compelling product vision and underpinned by astute market and customer insights.

 

UX sits at the heart of our future success in Europe - the customer-led discovery work you undertake will help us get closer to international rail travellers, understanding the differentiated value we can bring, and form the core of our new European Product vision. As such, you’ll be involved in every stage of brand and product development spanning strategy, design-led research activities, design development and product delivery.

 

You’ll be adept at driving a strong UX process in a fast moving, innovative environment and have mastery over your design craft, setting the bar for the wider design team. With the nous to understand when to obsess over the fine details and when to zoom out and focus on communicating and building the holistic product vision, you’ll empower the team with strong processes and tools to work through complex design problems with creativity, confidence and clarity, and will help to establish state-of-the-art design practices and a strong design culture.

 

Other responsibilities include:

 

- Setting goals and develop strategies for building and executing against a product vision working closely with Engineering, Brand, Research and Product within your team and business partners across the organisation (including those in London) to

- Building and owning the early stage processes to establish that product vision and collaborating cross-functionally with product management, engineering, research and marketing to ensure a smooth product design process and consistent visual language.

- Establishing strong, design-led research processes that yield actionable insights for the UX team to build from.

- Telling powerful stories across the business to drive confidence and conviction around Trainlines’ European growth plan.

- Staying on top of consumer and market trends to amplify Trainline's strategic and competitive edge

- Maintaining and evolving Trainline’s design system, in collaboration with our Engineers, to ensure the UI is consistently implemented across our portfolio of products

 

We ship new features at speed and employ a ‘build/test/learn’ mentality around our product development. To this end, you’ll play a critical role in leading the customer-led, “launch to learn” mindset to inspire travel in international markets and help us deliver on our stretch growth targets. This is a truly career defining role for someone passionate about creative leadership looking for an opportunity to play their part in disrupting and defining a product that is changing the way we travel and inspiring millions people all over the world to make more environmentally sustainable travel choices every day.

We’re looking for creative big thinkers with small egos to achieve our ambitious plans. Most importantly, you’ll bring exceptional delivery within your +6 years of design experience within a fast-paced agency or consumer-focused tech or online business, and will possess a passion for the speed that comes with working in an innovative, growth environment. You’ll be someone with deep understanding of the UX process, and the role of design values and principles within a growing, dedicated team. Similarly, you’ll be used to running usability testing sessions and defining how the outputs can be carried into design processes.

 

Outstanding communication and storytelling are critical in this role as you convey concepts and ideas to stakeholders at all levels in different shapes depending on the context. Your excellent leadership and relationship skills go without saying, and you will be proud of the fantastic network of creatives, engineers and technologists across the French and European Design industry you’ve built up over the years.

 

Oozing creativity and a beacon of energy in the UX team, we want you to inspire creative confidence. You’ll understand that Product teams fail as many times as they succeed albeit you’re capable of understanding why, and will bring an action orientated, hands-on approach to solving creative challenges. Your ability to converse confidently in French is a given, but an ability to speak another European language, particularly Spanish, would be useful although not essential.

Validating ideas with data and customer research will come as second nature to you, and understand that success is positively impacting customer behaviour, not just about shipping a release. You’ll bring experience designing digital products and systems, not just apps. Additionally, you will be a true self-starter who can deeply collaborate with Engineers and Product Owners. We use Figma, Sketch, Zeplin and Marvel here day-to-day, so a working knowledge of these as well as Framer or SwiftUI would be a bonus.