Principal Designer, Mobile Apps

The role

The Economist is consolidating Product, Engineering, Delivery, Design and Quality into a single Technology organisation built around durable, cross-functional teams aligned to coherent product and platform domains. Designers work inside those teams alongside engineers and product managers, and a small number of Principal Designers set the design direction and quality bar across them, without line-management responsibility.

Mobile apps are a domain where that design leadership matters most. The Economist app and Espresso are where many of our most engaged subscribers read, listen, watch and return each day, so the quality of the app experience bears directly on habit, engagement and retention.

The Principal Designer, Mobile Apps role is created to give the app portfolio a single senior design authority: someone who owns the end-to-end experience vision across our apps, does the hardest design work personally, and raises the craft of every designer and team that touches them. The role works as the design counterpart to the Head of Product & Engineering, Apps.

Responsibilities

The role holds design authority over the experience of The Economist’s mobile apps on iOS and Android, phone and tablet:

• Experience vision and journeys: The end-to-end experience across The Economist app and Espresso, from onboarding and first use through daily habit, subscription and renewal.
• Reading, listening and watching: Edition, article, navigation, search and personalisation experiences; audio and video, including players, playlists and moving smoothly between reading, listening and watching.
• Offline experience: Downloading editions, articles, audio and video for use without a connection, a core part of how many readers use the apps, so that the offline experience is as complete and dependable as the online one.
• Subscription and access: Onboarding, registration, paywall, in-app purchase and account journeys, designed within app-store guidelines and with the Commerce domain.
• Design system and platform conventions: The mobile layer of the design system, expressing the Economist brand while respecting Apple Human Interface Guidelines and Material Design, built with engineers as shared components.
• Accessibility and inclusion: Screen readers, dynamic type, contrast, motion and touch targets, to WCAG and platform accessibility standards.
• Emerging surfaces: Notifications, widgets, wearables and in-car audio, and AI-enabled features such as summaries, recommendations and conversational experiences.

The role works across every team that builds on the apps, with the Head of Product & Engineering, Apps, Product Managers, Engineering Managers, Product Designers, User Research, Brand, Editorial, Marketing and Data as partners. It does not own a team or a roadmap; it owns the design direction those roadmaps deliver against.

Accountabilities

• Set the design direction for apps: Define and maintain a clear, evidence-based experience vision for the app portfolio, and a practical path from today’s apps to it, aligned to product strategy and agreed with domain leaders.
• Lead the hardest design problems: Stay hands-on: frame, explore, prototype and design the most complex and consequential experiences personally, such as a new navigation model, a redesign of reading, listening and watching, or the offline experience or a new subscription journey.
• Ground design in evidence: Work with User Research, Data and Product to understand readers, listeners and viewers, test ideas early, and measure the effect of what ships through analytics and experimentation.
• Own design quality: Set and hold the quality bar for everything shipped in the apps, from interaction and motion to typography and copy, through critique, design review and close collaboration with engineering and QA.
• Shape the mobile design system: Lead the evolution of the mobile design system and its components with engineering, so that teams can move faster while the apps stay coherent.
• Champion accessibility: Make accessibility a default in how apps are designed and built, not a late-stage check.
• Raise the design bar: Mentor and develop Product Designers and Senior Product Designers; shape design practice, critique and hiring; and be a visible reason strong designers join and stay.
• Connect design to outcomes: Translate design decisions into product terms such as engagement, habit, retention, conversion and app-store ratings, and make the case for design investment.
• Partner deeply with engineering: Understand platform and technical constraints, including performance, and shape solutions with engineers early so that designs are both ambitious and buildable.

Who you are

• Mobile product design at scale: Substantial experience designing consumer mobile apps used by large audiences, typically with extensive experience in product design and a significant part of it as a senior or principal individual contributor. News, media, content or subscription apps strongly preferred.
• Native mobile craft: Deep command of iOS and Android conventions, interaction and motion design, and typography and layout for long-form reading on small screens.
• End-to-end product thinking: A track record of taking problems from research and framing through to shipped, measured outcomes, not just interface design.
• Design systems: Experience building and evolving a design system across platforms, including tokens, components and governance, in partnership with engineering.
• Evidence-led practice: Confident use of user research, analytics and A/B testing to shape and validate design decisions.
• Leading without line authority: Evidence of setting design direction across multiple teams and raising the work of other designers through influence, critique and example.
• Exceptional craft: A portfolio of shipped mobile work that shows outstanding visual, interaction and systems design, and fluency in modern tools such as Figma and prototyping software.
• Communication: Exceptional written, verbal and visual communication; able to make the case for a design to product, engineering, editorial and executive audiences alike.

Desirable

• Audio and video experiences: Designing listening and viewing experiences such as players, podcasts, narrated articles and video, including background and offline playback.
• Offline-first design: Designing apps that work well with poor or no connectivity, including downloads, sync and storage management.
• Subscriptions and in-app purchase: Familiarity with paywall, trial and in-app purchase journeys and app-store guidelines.
• Accessibility depth: Hands-on experience meeting WCAG and platform accessibility standards on a large app.
• Cross-platform delivery: Working knowledge of cross-platform frameworks such as React Native and how they shape design decisions.
• Brand-led editorial products: Experience designing for a strong editorial voice and a distinctive brand.
• AI-enabled experiences and ways of working: Designing AI-powered features, and using AI tools to speed up research, exploration and prototyping.
• Industry standing: Public contributions such as talks, writing, awards or open design resources in mobile or product design.

Attributes

• Obsessed with the reader, listener and viewer, and able to argue for them with evidence rather than opinion.
• Direct and evidence-led: makes the trade-off explicit, states the assumption, measures the result.
• Leads through influence rather than hierarchy; is sought out by teams rather than imposed on them.
• Credible with engineers, product managers and editorial leaders in the same week.
• Builds and simplifies: removes friction, clutter and inconsistency rather than adding features.
• Raises the standard of the people around them and multiplies the impact of every team they touch.

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