The Maffia and a public sector organisation are looking for a freelance Product Design Lead Digital Products.

Your role

Provide direction for product design across all digital products
Develop an overarching product design vision
Make design decisions that cut across team boundaries
Ensure product teams together deliver one recognisable and inclusive experience
Report to the Head of Product & Roadmap Management of Digital Products
Help product designers in the product teams bring the vision to life
Take on a coaching role towards all product designers
Cut the Gordian knot when design conflicts arise between teams
Develop a product design vision for Digital Products and translate it into guidelines and reusable patterns
Guide cross-product design trajectories, from elaboration to decision, together with product owners and product designers
Make the final call in design conflicts between teams
Collaborate constructively with other departments such as marketing, content and data & AI
Translate the needs and visions of other departments into outstanding product design
Safeguard the quality standard, with inclusive product design as the benchmark
Raise the craftsmanship of product designers to a higher level
Act as a sparring partner for product owners, product designers, design directors, creative directors and brand managers
Embrace AI in the product design process
Use AI tools for ideation, prototyping and managing guidelines and patterns
Help product designers use AI in a critical and responsible way
Be the subject-matter point of contact for product design, within Digital Products and beyond

Your profile

You have at least 8 years of hands-on experience in product design (UX and UI) for digital products with a large reach
You still design yourself where needed
You use your experience to bring product designers along in a unified way of working with guidelines and patterns
You have a strong sense of aesthetics and creativity
You combine this with systems thinking and knowledge of design systems on the market (tokens, components, patterns)
You have experience making and defending product design decisions across multiple teams or products
You have a coaching profile
You raise the craftsmanship of product designers in different teams without taking away their autonomy
You apply servant leadership to bring people along within a framework
You don't become the product design bottleneck in the product teams yourself
You have practical knowledge of digital accessibility (WCAG) and inclusive product design
You connect easily with creative profiles inside and outside the department
You have an open and curious attitude towards AI in product design
You actively experiment with AI and know where it strengthens design work and where human judgement remains decisive
You enjoy working autonomously
You move between the different product teams and follow up on product design trajectories
You speak Dutch
You work at least two days a week at the office in Brussels
Preferably, you have experience in the media sector or with video and audio streaming platforms