Product Design Team Lead - Daft.ie

What’s the Opportunity

Daft.ie is Ireland’s largest property portal, with a mission to make buying and selling property simple for everyone across the country. With over 3 million users visiting our website and apps every month, we’re driven by the opportunity to enhance the home buying and selling experience. If you’re excited to do impactful work that reaches hundreds of thousands of people daily, this could be the perfect role for you.

We’re seeking a Product Design Team Lead who can combine strong Design leadership with commercial acumen. You’ll manage and develop our design team while remaining hands-on, shaping how millions of people engage with property every day. This is an opportunity to guide design for Ireland’s leading property marketplace, delivering outcomes that improve user experience and support business success.

What will I be doing?

Lead and Elevate the Design Function

• Manage, coach, and inspire a small team of talented product designers, fostering growth, collaboration and accountability.

• Model high standards for design quality and execution, balancing creativity with commercial pragmatism.

• Establish and evolve design processes that align closely with product delivery rhythms, ensuring design is a strategic partner, not a downstream function.

Drive Marketplace Experience and Commercial Impact

• Partner with Product Managers to craft experiences that drive user engagement, conversion and advertiser success.

• Use research and data to find friction points in the user journey and identify high-impact opportunities that support Daft’s commercial strategy.

• Collaborate with Product, Engineering and Commercial teams to connect user value with business objectives.

Shape Design Vision and Strategy

• Define a compelling design vision for Daft’s marketplace, ensuring clarity and consistency across web and app platforms.

• Champion the user’s perspective while balancing the realities of business goals, timelines, and technical constraints.

• Drive continuous evolution of our design system to enable scalability, speed and cohesive brand expression.

Be a Hands-On Design Leader

• Contribute directly to high-impact projects, from early research to high-fidelity delivery.

• Lead user testing and usability validation, ensuring every major release improves experience and engagement.

• Collaborate closely with engineers to ensure smooth handover and pixel-perfect execution.

What skills and experience do I need

• 6+ years in Product or UX Design, including 1–2 years in a leadership or mentorship capacity.

• Commercial Mindset: Demonstrated experience delivering designs that move business metrics, whether it’s engagement, monetisation, or retention.

• Strategic Thinking: Ability to align design strategy with commercial objectives, driving clarity and focus within fast-moving product teams.

• UX Craft & Research: Strong grasp of user research, usability testing, and behaviour-driven design, using insights to inform decisions. Experience using 

• Qualitative and Quantitative Research: Experienced in combining qualitative insights (interviews, usability testing) with quantitative data (analytics, experimentation, surveys) to inform strategy and validate design hypotheses. Skilled in leveraging insights from Hotjar, Wootric and Google Analytics to identify opportunities, measure impact and enhance user experience.

• Marketplace Expertise: Proven experience designing for two-sided platforms or digital marketplaces, would be an advantage.

• Process design / improvement: Experience in improving design processes and working to ensure that the design team is set up for success.

• Tools & Systems: Expert in Figma, Miro, and modern design system management, with an understanding of front-end technologies.

• Collaboration: Able to work effectively with Product Managers and Engineers, translating between user empathy, product priorities and business impact.

• Communication: A natural storyteller who can articulate design rationale clearly to technical and non-technical audiences alike.

Why This Role Matters

Design is central to Daft’s mission of simplifying property for everyone. As Product Design Team Lead, you’ll:

• Shape how millions of users experience Ireland’s leading property marketplace.

• Build and mentor a design team that thrives on clarity, impact, and collaboration.

• Partner closely with senior product and business leaders to design solutions that balance user value and commercial success.

This is a role for a strategic design leader who still loves the craft, someone who sees design as a lever for business growth, and who’s ready to leave a tangible mark on how Ireland moves home.

What’s it like to work here

You will have the opportunity to work with one of Ireland's fastest growing Internet companies. You will get the chance to create a significant contribution to our strategic direction. Projects are exciting and employees are given wide scope for creativity and innovation

Benefits - what you can expect

• Our goal is to maintain a culture where people look forward to work – whether in our centrally located office in Dublin or working from home, which is optional for all employees.

• We do that by making Distilled a place you'll be listened to and trusted to do your job. Where you can have fun, learn and feel appreciated. And where you get focused career development, growth and progression opportunities.

• We want you to feel confident that this is the right place for you, your career, your wellbeing and your future.

• Above all, your health and wellbeing are at the forefront of how we build the business. That means looking after you while you're here and later in life. So you'll receive life insurance, fully-paid healthcare and a 5% contribution towards your pension.

More about Distilled

We exist to make buying and selling in Ireland simple.

We put our people first, creating an inclusive environment where we can develop products that put our users first. We value people’s work and time, creating a community where they have an opportunity to make an impact and grow.

Our challenge is to enhance our market-leading products using insights and empathy to present our users with the perfect match.

What we build is technology, but what we do is create connections for life’s most meaningful moments. We are Distilled and we bring people together.

Our Values

We have five core values: We have a growth mindset. We like to simplify things and make things happen. We collaborate across teams, business units and brands. We're passionate about what we do.

These values give us a framework for leadership and daily decision making. They embody how we behave and present ourselves — as individuals and as a business — both internally and externally for our colleagues, our users and our customers.

We are a diverse bunch of people here in Distilled, and we want to continue to attract and retain a diverse range of people into our Company. We do not discriminate based on gender, marital status, family status, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, race and membership of the Traveller community.