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Head of Experience Design - AI Lab

Location: London

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Technology

In short

We are looking for a Head of Experience Design to join On's newly formed AI Lab. The AI Lab is a small cross-functional team who, unlike our core digital product teams, are tasked with looking 18+ months into the future.

Our vision is to shape the future of AI-driven digital experiences, inspiring innovation and empowering everyone to push boundaries and redefine what's possible.

You will operate between London and Zurich, working extremely collaboratively to conceive, ideate, prototype and validate the future vision of On's relationship with its customers via emerging technologies.

Your Mission

The Role

You can operate in a startup environment - flat hierarchy, multiple hats, fast decisions. But you stay deeply connected to the wider business, helping inspiration to flow both ways.

Comfort with ambiguity

You thrive without a roadmap, taking abstract goals and rapidly visualising solutions. Undefined requirements excite you rather than frustrate you.

Buy-in through storytelling

You create work with the fidelity and narrative quality to sell the vision to Founders, Executive Board, and global partners. Helping to create consensus through tangible examples.

Proactive brief generation

You don't wait for assignments. You identify opportunities through consumer insight, technical exploration, and market understanding. You build "source of truth" prototypes that prove the unknown, then create blueprints others can scale.

Divergent and convergent agility

You open up problem spaces and narrow them down to something actionable, you understand when we need to go wide and narrow.

Strategic maker

You think strategically but get your hands dirty. You're equally comfortable in stakeholder workshops and prototyping.

Evidence-based conviction

You form strong points of view based on evidence, not trends. You advocate for ideas while remaining open to being wrong.

Problem space definition

You define and articulate the problem space, not just solve problems handed to you. You take high-level ambitions and structure them into tangible service blueprints, identifying gaps between customer goals and motivations.

Methodological flexibility and invention

You're fluent in a wide range of research, design thinking, and validation techniques. Working in nascent opportunity spaces, you adapt established methods or define new ones. You are comfortable having an evolving understanding through research, knowing when we need certainty and when uncertainty is OK.

Organisational integration architect

You will be key in defining how the Lab engages with the wider business, creating processes that bring stakeholders into our work at the right moments. You run workshops that incorporate wider teams into discovery and validation. You present work strategically - knowing when we need buy-in, when we need to contextualise customer insights and when we're helping predict market trends.

End-to-end journey orchestration

You design complete customer experiences that span physical products, digital touchpoints, retail, and services. You understand how AI can enhance or transform these journeys, not just add features.

Physical and digital fluency

You test experiences in the real contexts where they'll be used - movement, weather, physical constraints. You understand how wearables, spatial computing, and physical products create different design challenges than screen-based experiences.

Ethnographic insight to opportunity

You move beyond analytics to lived experience. You identify unmet needs and behavioral patterns that become the foundation for new product concepts and lab briefs.

Service ecosystem thinking

You map connections between On's products, digital experiences, retail partners, and third-party platforms. You design for AI experiences that work across this ecosystem seamlessly.

Research to prototype fluency

You move from user research to experience concepts to service blueprints comfortably. You make abstract insights concrete through storyboards, journey maps, and experience prototypes that teams can build from.

Leading through influence and development

As leader in the team, you shape experience strategy through your work while coaching and mentoring people in these strategies. You build conviction in stakeholders about what customers actually need and elevate the team's capability.

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Your story

Senior experience design leadership

Significant track record defining customer experiences and problem spaces, not just documenting them. You've shaped product strategy and driven commercial outcomes through customer insight.

Innovation or emerging technology context

Experience working on 0-1 products, new service models, or experiences with emerging technologies. You've designed when established patterns didn't exist and worked within teams whose mandate was invention.

Pattern recognition and synthesis

You recognize themes across projects and synthesize learning. You're a thought leader who communicates insights that shape how teams think about problems.

End-to-end ownership

Portfolio shows complete journeys, not just individual touchpoints. You've designed experiences that span multiple channels, physical contexts, and stakeholder groups.

Participatory collaboration

You refuse cold handoffs. You work extremely collaboratively in cross-functional teams, testing and iterating constantly and explaining outputs throughout, not just at the end.

Physical product experience

You've tested and designed for physical devices, wearables, or hardware in real-world contexts. You understand constraints of movement, weather, and physical use that screen-based design doesn't face.

Influence at senior levels

Track record of facilitating cross-functional teams and influencing at C-suite or board level. You make complex service systems understandable and actionable.

Consumer product impact

You've taken experience concepts from research through to launched services in consumer-facing contexts, ideally in active lifestyle, sports, wellness, retail, or adjacent categories.

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About the Team

You will be part of a small cross-functional team of senior strategic practitioners, including creative technology, engineering, product management, design and research.

We envision On's digital future by leveraging customer insights, conducting R&D on emerging technologies, and developing prototypes that serve as the foundation for new products and services.

As a small team we are all required to contribute to every phase of ideation from research to development of product blueprints the digital team can build. Our mission requires us to be comfortable with divergent and convergent thinking, collaboration within the team and externally to stakeholders, anyone in the wider organisation or external partners.

Crucially, this is not a team that simply executes requests. We act as an "insight engine," identifying opportunities in the market and generating our own briefs based on a deep understanding of consumers, technical innovations and On's evolving business landscape.

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What we offer

On is a place that is centered around growth and progress. We offer an environment designed to give people the tools to develop holistically – to stay active, to learn, explore and innovate. Our distinctive approach combines a supportive, team-oriented atmosphere, with access to personal self-care for both physical and mental well-being, so each person is led by purpose.

On is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to creating a work environment that is fair and inclusive, where all decisions related to recruitment, advancement, and retention are free of discrimination.

Build the better you

What to expect

We want to set everyone up for success, so here’s the lowdown on how we hire. Our process is a two-way street – bringing you into our culture, while helping us learn how you think.

Our full process can last about eight weeks from application to offer, because we care about getting it right. These steps explain how we usually do things.

Before you get started, feel free to consider if you want to work with us. Strange question? Well, we give people a lot of space to navigate their day-to-day and that style isn't for everyone. We want you to be passionate about what you do and be sure this is the right fit. Because when skills and passion combine – it creates that 'Wow' moment.