Director of Product Design

OUR MISSION

To become the car-changing destination of choice. By combining technology, media and deep automotive expertise, we've turned how people buy, sell, advertise and lease cars on its head.

What started as a simple reviews site is now one of the largest online car-changing destinations in Europe. Last year alone we grew over 50% with nearly £3bn worth of cars bought on site, while £1.8bn of cars were listed for sale through our Sell My Car service.

In 2024 we went big and acquired Autovia – creators of AutoExpress and Evo magazines – doubling our audience overnight. Together we now have one of the biggest YouTube channels in the world with almost 10m subscribers and over 1.1 billion annual views, while we sell 1.2 million print copies of our magazines and have an annual web content reach over 350million.

And we're a long way from done!

THE ROLE

We're looking for a Director of Product Design to lead our design team and help us build the next version of Carwow.

Reporting to the VP of Product, you'll be a key partner in shaping our product vision and turning it into a great experience for both customers and dealers.

Carwow is a two-sided marketplace. We help people work out what car is right for them, buy their next car and sell their current one. At the same time, we help dealers find customers, source the right stock and sell more cars.

We want these experiences to feel much more connected. Our ambition is to build a car-changing platform that becomes the natural place to go when you're thinking about changing your car and an increasingly important part of how dealers run their businesses.

That's the challenge we want this person to help us solve.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Shape the experience with us: Work closely with the VP of Product and our Product and Engineering leaders to define what the Carwow experience should become over the next few years.

• Design for both sides of our marketplace: Make sure we deeply understand both customers and dealers. Look for opportunities where making one side of the marketplace better also makes the other stronger.

• Connect the experience: We have great products, but they don't always feel like one product. You'll help us connect discovery, buying and selling across web and app, while doing the same for the dealer experience.

• Raise the bar for design: Help us make simpler, more useful and better-designed products. Set a high standard, but stay close enough to the work to help teams reach it.

• Build a great design team: Lead, coach and develop our Product Designers. Hire brilliant people when we need to and create an environment where designers can do the best work of their careers.

• Stay close to the problem: This isn't a role for someone who wants to manage design from a distance. We want you talking to customers and dealers, reviewing work, challenging thinking and getting involved in our hardest product problems.

• Use data and experimentation: Work with Product and Analytics to understand how our designs perform, test our assumptions and use what we learn to make the experience better.

• Explore what AI makes possible: AI is changing both the products we build and how we build them. We want someone who has used AI in real products and, more importantly, has good judgement about where it genuinely improves the experience and where it doesn't.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• We're looking for someone who has led Product Design in a strong digital product business and still loves the work itself.

• You’ll have strong product judgement, care deeply about craft and know how to make complicated things feel simple.

• You’ll have experience designing for a marketplace, platform or similarly complex product with very different types of users. You’ll understand that designing for consumers and designing tools that professionals use every day are different challenges, and be comfortable balancing the needs of both.

• You’ll also need to be a great partner to Product and Engineering — able to challenge, listen, bring people together and make the product better.

• Automotive experience isn’t important. We’d much rather find someone who brings a fresh perspective and has helped build products people genuinely love using.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

• A year from now, we should be able to see and feel the difference.

• We should have a clear, shared vision for the Carwow experience across customers and dealers, with meaningful progress towards making it real.

• Our customer and dealer experiences should feel more connected, and we should be able to point to measurable improvements in the experiences and outcomes that matter most.

• The quality and consistency of our design should be noticeably higher, with a stronger design team doing some of the best work of their careers.

• Most importantly, we should be closer to building a Carwow that customers want to come back to whenever they change their car, and that dealers wouldn’t want to run their business without.

WHY CARWOW?

• Genuine scale and impact: your work is used by millions of car buyers and sellers

• An AI-forward culture where new tools and workflows are embraced, not resisted — with access to the best tooling available

• A senior, supportive design team that takes craft seriously

• Hybrid working, competitive salary and equity, private healthcare, enhanced parental leave, and a car-buying perk you'd expect from us

WHAT'S IN IT FOR YOU

• Hybrid working

• Competitive salary to fund that dream holiday to Bali

• Matched pension contributions for a peaceful retirement

• Share options - when we thrive, so do you!

• Vitality Private Healthcare, for peace of mind, plus eyecare vouchers

• Life Assurance for (even more) peace of mind

• Monthly coaching sessions with Spill - our mental wellbeing partner

• Enhanced holiday package, plus Bank Holidays

• 28 days annual leave

• 1 day for your wedding

• 1 day off when you move house - because moving is hard enough without work!

• For your third year anniversary, get 30 days of annual leave per year

• For your tenth year anniversary, get 35 days of annual leave per year

• Option to buy 3 extra days of holiday per year

Work from abroad for a month

Inclusive parental, partner and shared parental leave, fertility treatment and pregnancy loss policies

Bubble childcare support and discounted nanny fees for little ones

The latest tech (Macbook or Surface) to power your gif-sending talents

Up to £500/€550 home office allowance for that massage chair you've been talking about

Generous learning and development budget to help you master your craft

Regular social events: tech lunches, coffee with the exec sessions, lunch 8 learns, book clubs, social events/anything else you pester us for

Refer a friend, get paid. Repeat for infinite money

Diversity and inclusion is an integral part of our culture. We know that diverse teams are strong teams, so we welcome those with alternative identities, backgrounds, and experiences to apply for this position. We make recruiting decisions based on experience, skills and potential, so all our applicants are treated fairly and equally.

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