Senior Product Designer - Contractor

Senior Product Designer - Contractor - 12 months (Maternity Cover)

Day rate: £450

3 days a week

The Role

Modern Milkman is a return and reuse grocery delivery service on a mission to reduce waste. We deliver fresh milk, groceries, and household products to customers' doors in returnable glass bottles, reusable containers, and recyclable packaging - working directly with independent farmers and suppliers to keep things local and sustainable. As we continue to scale, we're looking for a customer-centric Product Designer to elevate our product experience and embed strong design and research practices across the business. You'll be a creative thinker with a genuine passion for research and the drive to see work through from concept to measurable outcome. A key focus will be supporting our CRO efforts, so experience in this area is a big plus.

What You Will Do

Take the lead on all things product design: You'll take charge of the design process - problem discovery, ideating, wireframing, prototyping, and delivering high-fidelity designs that solve real problems.

Conduct generative and evaluative research:

Generative user research: Identify user pain points and uncover unmet needs by conducting interviews, surveys, and observational studies. You'll help shape our understanding of what problems need solving.

Evaluative user research: Test how users interact with potential solutions through usability tests, A/B testing, and feedback sessions. You'll ensure our ideas resonate with users and refine designs based on what works (and what doesn't).

Industry and competitor research: Keep a pulse on the market by conducting competitor analysis and industry research. Understand emerging trends, best practices, and what the competition is doing well (or not so well) to inform our design direction and ensure we're always ahead.

Support CRO: Collaborate with our CRO team to optimise user journeys, boost conversion rates, and refine product experiences through research and data-informed design decisions.

Create wireframes, prototypes, and mockups: Develop wireframes and interactive prototypes to bring your design ideas to life, making it easy for stakeholders and developers to understand and engage with your concepts.

Collaborate across teams: You'll work closely with developers, product managers, and marketers to bring your designs to life, staying involved in the entire product development process.

Present and sell your ideas: Confidently pitch your designs to stakeholders, explaining how your approach addresses user needs and supports the business goals.

Support developers: Create and maintain design systems, component libraries, and reusable assets to help developers implement your designs easily and consistently.

Contribute to product strategy: Work closely with product managers to help define the product vision and strategy, ensuring your designs support our overall direction.

Drive the use of AI in design and research workflows:

Identify and implement practical ways to use AI to increase speed and quality across design and research. This includes rapid prototyping and UI generation, automating parts of the design process, and scaling research analysis (e.g. synthesising user feedback and identifying insights).

Focus on delivering measurable improvements in efficiency, experimentation velocity, and decision-making.

What you will bring

• Strong end-to-end product design capability: Comfortable owning the full design process from problem discovery through to high-fidelity delivery, with a focus on solving real customer problems.
• User research expertise: Ability to plan and run both generative and evaluative research, and translate insights into clear, actionable product decisions.
• Commercial awareness: You understand how design impacts key business metrics, particularly conversion, retention, and customer lifetime value, and can prioritise accordingly.
• Experience with CRO and experimentation: Familiar with running or supporting A/B tests, forming hypotheses, and iterating based on data and user feedback.
• Bias for action in low-process environments: Able to move quickly, make progress with imperfect information, and balance speed with quality.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills: Comfortable working closely with product managers, engineers, and stakeholders, and able to clearly explain and justify design decisions.
• Ability to influence without authority: You can bring others along with your thinking and advocate for the user while balancing business needs.
• Systems thinking: Experience contributing to or maintaining design systems and ensuring consistency across a product.
• Comfort working with data: Able to use both qualitative and quantitative inputs to inform decisions, and not rely on intuition alone.
• Practical use of AI in design workflows: Experience using AI tools to accelerate design and research (e.g. rapid prototyping, UI generation, synthesising research insights), with a focus on improving speed and quality rather than novelty.
• Ownership mindset: You take responsibility for outcomes, not just outputs, and follow work through to ensure it delivers impact.