THE ROLE & THE TEAM

As the Principal Product Designer on the Scale + Efficiency Studio team within Zalando Lounge, you will lead initiatives that unlock the ambitious growth goals of Europe’s favorite shopping club. Millions of customers come to Lounge for great deals on a daily refreshed assortment of fashion and lifestyle – our vision is to transform this business by tightly integrating the processes, tools and workflows on the back-end of the business that power an exceptional Customer Experience on the front-end. The role is and Individual Contributor but at the same seniority as a Design Manager. You will report to Thomas Schluchter.
The Scale + Efficiency Studio operates at a critical intersection, bridging the Business-to-Customer (B2C) experiences of Zalando Lounge with the Business-to-Employee (B2E) and Business-to-Business (B2B) tooling that underpins our operations. Our team includes Product Designers dedicated to commercial growth and loyalty initiatives on the Lounge platform (B2C), as well as those focused on developing employee-facing tools for departments like Markets, Supply, and Pricing (B2E/B).
This unique placement requires a profile with high seniority and extensive experience across B2C, B2B, and B2E domains, allowing us to connect the customer-facing and internal/partner-facing sides into an efficient service ecosystem. A key aspect of this role involves designing products that leverage Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for improving efficiency, decision-making and forecasting.

WHAT WE’D LOVE YOU TO DO (AND LOVE DOING)

• You will accelerate the delivery of critical projects across both B2C and B2E initiatives, either by direct execution or by effectively pairing with responsible designers. Your solutions will be inspiring to customers, brand partners, and colleagues, raising the bar for solution design quality.
• You will drive a long-term project focused on creating and maintaining a shared, end-to-end mapping of the service ecosystem within the Core Value Creation flow and its impact on the Customer Experience (CX). This will empower the organization to proactively identify and address process bottlenecks leading to poor CX.
• You will foster collaboration between the customer-facing and employee/partner-facing sides of the business, facilitating exchange and identifying opportunities for synergistic projects. You will bring big-picture thinking to life through collaboration, craft, and a proactive mindset.
• You will elevate the design maturity within the B2E side through structured collaboration and by raising the bar on Discovery and Definition phases. This will allow Senior designers to focus more on craft, quality of execution, and speed of delivery.
• You will oversee the implementation of the B2E frontend strategy, including establishing a modern, scalable Design System and the gradual migration of legacy interfaces, in close collaboration with the Frontend Engineering community.
• As a customer-focused design thought leader and role model, you will contribute to the Zalando Product Design community and the larger European design industry by sharing best practices, mentoring and teaching colleagues, crafting best-in-class solutions, bar-raising in design reviews, and sparking inspiring conversations.
• You will partner with design management and work with executive leaders. You will spearhead design initiatives, design ops workstreams, and advances in product development practices.