Senior Experience Designer

Company Description With 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 DO

• Lead 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 market
• Synthesise signals from user research, market trends, competitive movements, and emerging tech into coherent strategic narratives for senior stakeholders
• Develop and present future-state concepts, design provocations, and strategic direction frameworks to Product, Engineering, and Leadership
• Run structured discovery sprints, from desk research and expert interviews through to speculative concept development, to pressure-test nascent ideas before they become commitments
• Explore foresight methods (horizon scanning, scenario planning, design fiction) to help the organisation see around corners on a 2 to 3 year view
• Frame innovation opportunities as user-centred design challenges, ensuring greenfield bets are grounded in real human needs, not just technical or commercial logic
• Partner with Engineering at an early, ambiguous stage to understand the art of the possible and bring technical feasibility into the strategic picture
• Create artefacts (concept decks, prototype narratives, experience principles, opportunity maps) that make intangible ideas tangible and discussable
• Contribute a strategic UX lens into business planning conversations, helping shape where zooplus invests its exploratory energy
• Stay ahead of how AI-assisted design and generative tooling are reshaping both the design process and the product landscape

Qualifications

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• 4-6 years of UX or product design experience, with a clear track record of work that went beyond execution into strategic problem framing
• Demonstrated ability to operate in ambiguity, where the problem isn’t defined and neither is the solution space
• Experience leading discovery or design sprints
• Strong systems thinking, the ability to connect insights from disparate domains (user behaviour, market dynamics, technology shifts, cultural signals) into a coherent point of view
• Confident presenter and storyteller, able to make abstract future-state concepts legible and compelling to senior, non-design audiences
• A portfolio that shows not just what you made, but what you framed, why, and what happened as a result
• Comfort sitting in the space between strategy and craft, moving fluidly between a whiteboard session and a Figma prototype that communicates a concept
• Curiosity about AI, both as a tool that changes how we design, and as a force reshaping the products and experiences we need to design for

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience in a dedicated innovation, futures, or strategic design function (in-house or consultancy)
• Exposure to ecommerce, subscription products, or multi-market consumer platforms
• Familiarity with Jobs-to-be-Done or similar frameworks for understanding latent user needs
• Experience with generative AI tools as part of a design or prototyping workflow
• Familiarity with foresight and futures methods (horizon scanning, scenario planning, speculative design), even if practised informally

WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE

• You’re comfortable walking into a discussion with a point of view, not just a deliverable
• You can spot a pattern across three unrelated data sources and articulate why it matters
• You’