Lead Product Designer

Join Cafeyn: Where Innovation Meets Inspiration
Cafeyn is more than a platform— it is transforming the way people access and experience content. Since 2006, we’ve grown in a fast-evolving market, adapting to become a leading digital reading service with over 2 million users worldwide. Cafeyn gives readers unlimited, personalized access to thousands of newspapers and magazines, curated to fit their tastes and delivered seamlessly across devices.

Our mission?
To empower individuals with access to trusted, high-quality content that fosters personal growth and discovery. Whether it's through the comprehensive collection of news and features on Cafeyn, the digital publishing solutions of Milibris, the fun and educative content for children on Kidjo, or the collections for manga lovers by Mangas.io, Cafeyn stands at the forefront of digital content experiences.

Your team & responsibilities

As Lead Product Designer, you'll join our dynamic and growing team in Paris and take on a role that blends craft leadership with people management. Your mission is twofold: shape the future of Cafeyn's user experience across platforms, and grow the designers who will build it with you. Reporting directly to the Director of Product, you are entrusted with understanding both user needs and business objectives, translating them into designs that are visually appealing, intuitive, and measurably effective, while managing and developing a team of 2 Product Designers.

You will be the architect of our product experience, moving seamlessly from high-level discovery and hypothesis testing to the "shaping" of features for development. Beyond your own craft, you will raise the bar for the whole design team: improving operational excellence, embedding rigor into how we work, and introducing AI as a tool to accelerate design velocity and increase the quality of our output.

We are looking for a design leader to strengthen our design team for the Cafeyn & Readly platforms (serving 2M+ users across 15 geographies).

Your missions

Team Leadership & Growth

• People Management: Manage 2 Product Designers. Set clear goals, provide regular feedback, and support their career growth through coaching and mentorship

• Talent Development: Identify each designer's strengths and growth areas; create development paths that help them progress in their role and craft

• Design Culture: Build a team culture of rigor, ownership, and continuous improvement, and represent design's voice and impact to the broader organization

Discovery & Shaping

• Discovery Mastering: Define, plan, and execute the design discovery process. You will craft problem statements, build hypotheses, and create rapid prototypes to test with users long before a single line of code is written.

• The "Shaping" Phase: Act as the bridge between Discovery and Delivery. You will ensure that final designs are platform-agnostic, brand-compliant, and technically feasible. You own the hand-off, ensuring engineers have everything they need to build with precision

• User & Business Centric: Understand and incorporate user needs and business objectives into your designs and your team's designs

Design Craft & Design Systems

• UX/UI Excellence: Deliver (and review) high-fidelity designs, complex user flows, and interactive prototypes that raise the bar for our industry

• Design System Contribution: Actively contribute to and evolve our global Design System. You ensure consistency across multiple brands and platforms (iOS, Android, Web)

• Evidence-Based Advocacy: Partner with the Analyst and the User Researcher to integrate insights into your team's designs. You are the advocate for the user, ensuring the interface is as intuitive as it is beautiful

Operational Excellence & AI Enablement

• Process Improvement: Assess and improve the design team's rituals, tools, and processes to increase velocity and consistency of output

• AI as an Accelerator: Introduce and champion AI tools within the design workflow (research synthesis, ideation, prototyping, QA) to speed up execution and raise the quality bar, while setting the right guardrails for their use

Who are we looking for?

You are at the right place if you have

• You have 8+ years of experience in Product Design, ideally within high-growth B2C environments handling millions of users across mobile apps, including at least one experience managing or leading a Product Design team

• You have direct experience managing people: setting goals, giving feedback, and helping designers grow in their role. You see team development as core to the job, not a side task

• You are a master of the double-diamond. You know how to navigate ambiguity, facilitate brainstorming sessions, and turn messy insights into clear prototypes, and can coach others to do the same

• You use Figma to its full potential to build clean, scalable components and high-fidelity prototypes

• You understand the constraints of mobile development. You don't just "draw" interfaces; you design systems that work in production

• You are curious about and comfortable with AI tools for design and are ready to bring them into the team's workflow to accelerate velocity and improve quality

• You know how to turn complex features into clear, compelling narratives that resonate with users and stakeholders alike

• You speak the language of PMs and Data Analysts. You are comfortable discussing conversion funnels, A/B test results, and trade-offs in technical debt

• You are autonomous. You identify friction points in the user journey and propose solutions

• Excellent communication skills. You can present your ideas clearly, give constructive feedback, and inspire your team.

• You are fluent in French and English, capable of presenting complex design rationales to international stakeholders in both languages
  

Hiring process

1. HR Interview with one of our Talent Acquisition Manager (30’)

2. Hiring manager Interview with Kevin, our Product Director.

3. Case study that you will present to our Product & Design team.

4. Brand & Design Interview with Yael, our Head of Brand.

5. Peer Interview with our Product & Design team.

6. Last Interview with Minh, our CPSO.

Perks & benefits of working at Cafeyn

• Classic package 🎓

We provide a Swile card for your meal vouchers, Sidecare health insurance, and a mobility package to reimburse your transport subscription.

• Sports 🏃

We have a partnership with Wellpass that gives you access to fitness classes and wellness activities for both exercise and relaxation as you want.

• Mental Health 🧠

You have an access to our mental health platform teale, where you can book appointments with your psychologist or monitor your mental health.

• Hybrid policy 🏠

We allow you to work remotely two days per week.

• Cafeyn’s access 🗞️

We provide you with a VIP code for Cafeyn, giving you unlimited access to all content on our platform.

• Team life 🪅

We organize four office meet-ups per year. These occasions allow us to gather with our international offices, celebrate company updates, and spend quality time together.

You don’t have to match all the requirements, if you feel this offer could be a great opportunity for you, reach out anyways! We hire based on talent and we promote inclusivity inside Cafeyn and strongly believe that our culture is strongest when it is the most diverse.