Head of Product Design

Fresh Food, Happy Dogs.

We believe dogs deserve the healthiest, most natural and tastiest meals - with none of the nasties. That’s why we make FRESHly prepared food, cooked just like you would at home and delivered direct to our customers in perfect portions. As a B-Corp certified company, you’re joining a sustainable business that genuinely cares about our people, our products and our impact on the planet. Our goal is simple: to help dogs live healthier, happier, and longer lives, while leaving humans smiling after every interaction.

We’ve come a long way since our co-founders (Kev & Dave), hand delivered the very first Butternut Box. Today, we feed hundreds of thousands of hungry dogs across the UK and Europe - but we won’t stop until we’re feeding dogs everywhere. To get there, we need a team of brilliant people who share that ambition to come and work for us.

📣 A bit about the role

We're looking for an exceptional design leader to shape and elevate Design across Butternut and Marro.

You'll lead a team of four experienced Product Designers working across two businesses at very different stages of maturity. Butternut is a fast-growing subscription business serving hundreds of thousands of dogs across Europe. Marro is earlier in its journey, and we’re still discovering what exceptional looks like for cats.

This role exists because we believe Design should play an even bigger role in shaping the products we build and the decisions we make.

We're looking for someone with exceptional product design judgement and taste. Someone who can raise the quality bar through coaching, thoughtful critique and selective hands-on contribution. Someone who is just as passionate about developing designers as they are about creating exceptional customer experiences.

You'll help establish Design as an equal partner alongside Product and Engineering, ensuring great UX thinking is embedded throughout our product development process.

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This is a role for someone who...

• Gets genuine satisfaction from helping talented designers become exceptional.
• Has exceptional product design judgement and taste.
• Thrives on raising quality rather than increasing output.
• Believes the best product experiences are simple, intuitive and beautifully crafted.
• Knows when to coach, when to challenge and when to roll up their sleeves.
• Thinks in customer problems, not screens.
• Wants to build digital products that feel as premium as the food we make.

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🎯A bit about your responsibilities

Design Leadership & Coaching

• Develop and coach a team of experienced Product Designers, helping them grow in confidence, judgement and craft.
• Create a culture of thoughtful critique, continuous learning and high standards.
• Build an environment where designers feel challenged, supported and empowered to do the best work of their careers.

Product Design Quality, Craft & Practice

• Champion exceptional customer experiences and quality across every product we build.
• Help teams solve the right problems before designing solutions.
• Work with the Design team and cross-functional partners to articulate a compelling design vision and principles that define what exceptional product design means for Butternut and Marro, and ensure they genuinely guide decisions, critique and trade-offs.
• Raise the quality of UX, visual and interaction design across both brands.
• Ensure Design has meaningful influence throughout discovery, delivery and iteration.
• Continue evolving our design system, ensuring it remains actively maintained because it delivers real value.
• Strengthen our research practice by building robust methodologies, reducing bias and increasing confidence in the insights we generate.

Cross-functional Leadership

• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Data & AI leaders to shape product direction.
• Represent Design within Product Engineering leadership.
• Help build a culture where Design is viewed as a genuine strategic partner.
• Advocate for great customer experiences and thoughtful design decisions across the organisation.

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🚀 You'll know you're succeeding when...

• Designers say they've grown more in the last year than in the previous two.
• UX quality has noticeably improved across Butternut and Marro.
• Design quality is more consistent across products and touchpoints.
• We can point to meaningful examples where better design has contributed to measurable customer and commercial outcomes.
• We have a clear design vision and principles that teams actively use to guide decisions and raise the quality bar.
• The design system is widely adopted and actively maintained because it's genuinely useful.
• Research is trusted and consistently leads to better product decisions.
• The product experience feels as premium as the food.

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🐾 A bit about you

1. You build exceptional designers

• You love helping strong designers become exceptional.
• You've coached experienced Product Designers and know how to raise the bar through thoughtful feedback, mentorship and high expectations.

2. You have exceptional product design judgement and taste

• You know how to solve the right problems.
• You recognise exceptional product experiences and know how to help teams create them.
• You care deeply about UX, interaction design, visual quality and the details that make products feel effortless.
• You know when something feels over-designed, under-designed, inconsistent or unnecessarily complex, and you know how to help teams improve it.
• You're commercially aware. You understand the business context in which we're designing and can help teams connect great design to both customer and commercial value.

3. You lead through credibility

• You build trust through judgement, curiosity and collaboration.
• You're comfortable challenging thinking, facilitating healthy debate and bringing people together around better outcomes.
• You make Product, Engineering and Design better by working together, not by working in isolation.

4. You know how to balance leadership with craft

• You maintain genuine and current craft credibility, staying close enough to the work to identify what isn't good enough, explain why, and help experienced designers find better solutions.
• You enjoy coaching and challenging through the work, and you're confident stepping in hands-on when your contribution can create disproportionate value.
• You don't need to own every project or be the best designer in the room. You understand that most of your leverage comes from raising the judgement, skills and quality of the team around you.

5. You build trusted design practices

• You've improved research, design systems or design processes. Not because frameworks are interesting, but because they help teams build better products.
• You understand how to build research capabilities that teams trust and use to make better decisions.

🙌 Our benefits:

• 25 days holiday (plus 8 bank holidays) and an additional day for every year of service up to 5 years
• 5 additional, paid 'paws' days off per year dedicated to your learning, development or personal wellbeing. Hit pause when you need it most
• £500 personal learning & development budget to sharpen your skills
• Share options grant - everyone owns a piece of Butternut's success.
• A significant discount on our Fresh food, to keep your own dogs as healthy as our customers
• Enhanced parental leave
• Flexible core working hours
• Cycle to work scheme
• Pension with NEST
• Private Medical Insurance with Vitality
• Private Dental Insurance with Bupa
• Paid time off for fertility treatments and pregnancy loss
• Paid sabbaticals for squad members with 5 or more years service at Butternut
• Discounted gym access through MyGymDiscounts
• Lots of office dogs (Ajax, Peggy, Chief, Louis, Hansen, Winnie and many more….)

💡 Important things to note:

• We recommend getting your application in as soon as possible. We reserve the right to close the role early.

• Our team thrives on collaboration. We spend 3 days a week in our West London office (Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday) and 2 days working from wherever you’re most productive. Because being together is a big part of our culture, we’re looking for someone within a comfortable commutable distance to London.

• We’re a small (but mighty!) recruitment team. We aim to respond to everyone personally, but if we’re flooded with brilliant applications, we may need to close the role early. We appreciate your patience while we review applications.

• For this specific role, we’re unable to offer visa sponsorship, so you’ll need the right to work in the UK.

❗️We believe in a seat at the table for everyone.

Butternut Box is an equal opportunity employer. We believe that to make the best food for all dogs, we need a team that represents all humans. We celebrate different nationalities, backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We are specifically committed to increasing representation from underrepresented groups. We want a strong, diverse team built from different identities and lived experiences. We’re not perfect, but we are dedicated to the ongoing work of building an inclusive, supportive place where you can do the best work of your career.