Principal Designer - User Research

Principal Designer – User Research

Up to £75,000 plus excellent benefits (Work Level 4)

Manchester city centre (hybrid working, splitting your time between home and the office)

We’re looking for a Principal Designer to join us in Manchester and lead the teams who are creating colleague-facing products and services that meet our colleague, customer, and business needs in our food stores.

In this role, you’ll guide our User Research community across Co-op and play a key role in our Design Leadership team. We’ll look to you to work closely with our Heads of Design and your other Principal Designer colleagues, championing the value of a user-centred approach to developing services.

What you’ll do

• Advocate for user-centred approaches towards the development of technology and processes within colleague products
• Work with product managers, service owners and design teams to find opportunities to pro-actively involve colleagues within the design and development process
• Support the design teams to build community, shared practices and knowledge across teams working on colleague products and services
• Collaborate with delivery and engineering leadership to continuously improve ways of working within product teams
• Support and coach our team of user researchers in identifying appropriate research methods
• Scale our approach to recruiting research participants, making sure we handle their data in a secure and ethical way
• Co-ordinate the allocation of colleagues  across our user research teams to make sure  they have everything they need to successfully deliver on tasks and projects
• Encourage and support our design community to share their knowledge and experience across the wider business
• Line-manage up to 4 of our Lead Designer colleagues, supporting them to effectively manage their own teams

This role would suit people who have

• Significant experience within a User Research role
• Senior management experience, with the ability to lead teams of 4 or more people
• An expert understanding of user research principles, methods, and techniques
• A good understanding of accessibility and usability
• Good communication skills, with the ability to translate complex information for a non-technical audience
• Good relationship-building skills, with the ability to influence and challenge people inclusively

Why Co-op?

If you’ve got the skills and experience we’re looking for, we can offer you a competitive salary and great benefits package which includes 30% off Co-op branded products in our food stores (as well as other discounts on Co-op products and services). You’ll also get:

• Private healthcare
• A company car or £6,000 car allowance
• An annual bonus (based on personal and business performance)
• 28 days holiday (rising to 32 with service) plus bank holidays
• A pension with up to 10% employer contributions
• Access to a subsidised onsite gym (at our Manchester HQ)
• Coaching and training to support your career development
• Wagestream – a money management app that gives you access to a percentage of your pay as you earn it
• YuLife – an app that rewards you for exercising with discounts and vouchers for your favourite brands

Building an inclusive work environment

At Co-op, we’re proud to do things a different way. As one of the world’s largest co-operatives, owned by millions of members, community is at the heart of what we do. Since our Co-op was founded in 1844, we’ve had a clear social purpose, and everything we do as a business helps to build a fairer world for our members, customers, colleagues, and communities.

We’re actively building diverse teams and we welcome applications from everyone. If you have a disability, we can make reasonable adjustments to our recruitment process according to your needs. We're also part of the Disability Confident scheme, meaning we'll always offer an interview to disabled candidates who apply through the scheme if they meet the minimum criteria for a job.

We'll ask whether you’d like to be considered under the Disability Confident scheme when you apply.

If we invite you to take part in the recruitment process for any of our jobs, we’ll ask you if you need any reasonable adjustments to enable you to participate.

You can find out more about our recruitment process at jobs.coop.co.uk/apply-process.

You can find out more about the Disability Confident scheme and all our commitments to diversity and inclusion at colleagues.coop.co.uk/diversity-inclusion-and-wellbeing.

Please be aware that we may close applications for this role early