Senior Experience Designer

Company DescriptionWith over 25 years’ experience, plus the same enormous passion and ambition we had on day-one, we’re trailblazers in the pet e-commerce industry. Our solutions make over 12 million customers genuinely happier – and that’s something we really care about. We work together to continually adapt; embracing change and the challenges it brings so that we can keep doing better. Join us and discover a place where your potential meets your passion for pets. That’s the power of plus.

Job Description
As Senior UX Designer (Innovation) at zooplus, you’ll operate at the intersection of user insight, product strategy, and technology before any of it becomes a roadmap item. zooplus serves millions of pet owners across Europe, and the opportunity to reimagine how they discover, buy, and engage with pet care is significant. In collaboration with the Head of Experience Design Strategy, you will explore possibilities that haven’t yet been framed, synthesise signals from across the business and the market, and produce strategic design directions that give teams something real to act on.
This is a deeply collaborative role. You’ll work closely with Product, Engineering, and Commercial teams to co-create the questions worth asking. You’ll be the connective tissue between what our users need, what the business can pursue, and what’s technically feasible at the frontier.
WHAT YOU’LL DOLead greenfield design exploration, defining problem spaces, not just solving pre-scoped ones, across new product areas and business opportunities relevant to zooplus and the pet care marketSynthesise signals from user research, market trends, competitive movements, and emerging tech into coherent strategic narratives for senior stakeholdersDevelop and present future-state concepts, design provocations, and strategic direction frameworks to Product, Engineering, and LeadershipRun structured discovery sprints, from desk research and expert interviews through to speculative concept development, to pressure-test nascent ideas before they become commitmentsExplore foresight methods (horizon scanning, scenario planning, design fiction) to help the organisation see around corners on a 2 to 3 year viewFrame innovation opportunities as user-centred design challenges, ensuring greenfield bets are grounded in real human needs, not just technical or commercial logicPartner with Engineering at an early, ambiguous stage to understand the art of the possible and bring technical feasibility into the strategic pictureCreate artefacts (concept decks, prototype narratives, experience principles, opportunity maps) that make intangible ideas tangible and discussableContribute a strategic UX lens into business planning conversations, helping shape where zooplus invests its exploratory energyStay ahead of how AI-assisted design and generative tooling are reshaping both the design process and the product landscapeQualificationsWHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR4-6 years of UX or product design experience, with a clear track record of work that went beyond execution into strategic problem framingDemonstrated ability to operate in ambiguity, where the problem isn’t defined and neither is the solution spaceExperience leading discovery or design sprintsStrong systems thinking, the ability to connect insights from disparate domains (user behaviour, market dynamics, technology shifts, cultural signals) into a coherent point of viewConfident presenter and storyteller, able to make abstract future-state concepts legible and compelling to senior, non-design audiencesA portfolio that shows not just what you made, but what you framed, why, and what happened as a resultComfort sitting in the space between strategy and craft, moving fluidly between a whiteboard session and a Figma prototype that communicates a conceptCuriosity about AI, both as a tool that changes how we design, and as a force reshaping the products and experiences we need to design forNICE TO HAVEExperience in a dedicated innovation, futures, or strategic design function (in-house or consultancy)Exposure to ecommerce, subscription products, or multi-market consumer platformsFamiliarity with Jobs-to-be-Done or similar frameworks for understanding latent user needsExperience with generative AI tools as part of a design or prototyping workflowFamiliarity with foresight and futures methods (horizon scanning, scenario planning, speculative design), even if practised informallyWHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKEYou’re comfortable walking into a discussion with a point of view, not just a deliverableYou can spot a pattern across three unrelated data sources and articulate why it mattersYou’re as energised by the question “what problem should we even be solving?” as you are by “how do we solve it?”You know when to make a concept more concrete and when to keep it deliberately provocativeYou influence direction through the quality of your thinking and the clarity of how you communicate itAdditional InformationHeadquartered in Munich, with o