Product Design Lead

Who we are

Chowdeck is an on-demand delivery service for Africa. We deliver food, medicine, groceries and other packages seamlessly while providing customers with a platform to order from their favourite vendors.

At Chowdeck, we deeply value growth, excellence, speed, and empathy. Our team is a tight-knit group of creative problem solvers who are smart, kind, and committed to helping each other grow.

Where you come in

As the Product Design Lead at Chowdeck, you will lead product design across our customer, vendor, operations and trust products. You will be responsible for design quality, growing the team, our research practice, our design system, and how designers work with every other function.

This is a player-coach role. You will lead and develop designers and build stronger systems, while still rolling up your sleeves on important product problems whenever the team needs senior design judgement.

You will report to the Product Executive and coordinate dependencies with other functional teams. You will lead the central Product Design function and help shape how designers are assigned as the organisation grows.

What you will own

• The quality and coherence of Chowdeck’s product experiences across customer and internal surfaces.
• The product design team, including hiring, coaching, performance support and allocation across product teams.
• Product design principles, critique standards and decision quality.
• The design system and reusable interaction patterns across our products.
• The product research practice and the quality of evidence behind design decisions.
• Design operations, including planning, documentation, file organisation and cross-functional collaboration.

In this role you’ll be required to:

• Set a clear product design vision and turn it into practical standards for the team.
• Coach designers through discovery, interaction design, prototyping, validation and delivery.
• Run critiques that make the work better and help designers sharpen their judgement.
• Partner with functional leads to shape problems early, not just review interfaces at the end.
• Build and maintain the design system with clear ownership and adoption expectations.
• Improve how customer research and operational insight feed into product decisions.
• Plan design capacity, spot hiring needs and make sure priority teams get the right level of support.
• Collaborate with other design disciplines while keeping clear ownership of the product experience.

What success looks like

• Product teams get consistent, high-quality design support and bring Design in early enough to shape decisions.
• Designers have clear expectations, useful feedback and visible paths to grow.
• Shared patterns cut down on inconsistency and repeated design work across products.
• Research and usability evidence genuinely shape prioritisation and product decisions.
• The design team can support more product areas without lowering quality or burning people out.
• Chowdeck’s product experiences stay simple and coherent as the company expands.

You’re perfect for the role if you have:

• At least 6-7 years of product design experience, including at least 2 years leading, managing or mentoring product designers and raising the quality of a design team.
• Strong experience designing complex mobile and web products, with a portfolio that shows your process and decisions.
• Strong interaction, systems and visual-design judgement.
• Experience partnering closely with other functions from discovery through launch.
• The ability to move between strategic direction, detailed critique and hands-on design as needed.
• Clear communication, empathy, high standards and the ability to give direct, useful feedback.

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience designing for marketplaces, commerce, logistics, fintech or operational tools.
• Experience establishing or scaling a design system.
• Experience building a research practice or improving design operations in a growing company.

Beyond the paycheck, Chowdeck employees get:

• MacBook for your work
• Smart, kind colleagues invested in your growth
• Opportunities for rapid career progression
• Lunch allowance
• Ride credits for transport

Specific benefits, allowances, and coverage may vary by country or city in line with local regulations and market practices. Chowdeck is an equal-opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. Our employment philosophy is to hire the best people and empower them to do the best work of their lives. Employment decisions are based on business needs and individual merit without regard to race, color, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality, marital status, gender, or age.