Job Description
The New Yorker’s Puzzles & Games offering is one of the most distinctive and fastest‑growing corners of our digital portfolio. From the iconic crossword to newer games, this space blends editorial personality, interaction design, and habit‑forming product thinking. We’re looking for a Product Design Lead to build and expand this offering.
Location
London, GB
The Opportunity
We’re looking for a Product Design Lead whose primary focus is to elevate the game portfolio, concept new games, and create a deeper ecosystem that drives habit, reward, and loyalty for our brands’ users. This senior IC role offers creative scope, autonomy, and the chance to shape a product that millions of people enjoy daily.
Responsibilities
- Elevating and growing the game’s experience. Own the design quality of the Puzzles & Games portfolio, optimising what exists, concepting what comes next, and building a habit‑forming ecosystem around it. Bring a sophisticated understanding of gameplay mechanics, reward cycles, and moments of delight that keep players returning. Think about the ecosystem as well as the individual game: how touchpoints connect, how habits form, and how loyalty is built over time.
- Interrogating the brief, not just answering it. Ask “why this?” before “how.” Connect feature work to the wider player experience and business opportunity, identify gaps that others miss, and elevate the ambition of the work beyond the initial ask. Push back when the framing isn’t right and propose a better brief.
- Mastering interaction, motion, and feedback. An expert in the craft that makes games feel alive—micro‑interactions, motion, feedback states, and the precise timing that separates a satisfying experience from a frustrating one. Understand how every tap, transition, and animation contributes to the emotional texture of play.
- Knowing your player deeply. Run your own lightweight research and usability testing to pressure‑test ideas and prototypes. Partner closely with UX Research and Analytics specialists to go deeper where it matters, and bring this understanding into every design decision.
- Designing a connected ecosystem. Think beyond individual games to the wider experience: onboarding, streaks, rewards, social moments, and the journeys that turn a casual player into a loyal one. Connect the dots across the portfolio, ensuring touchpoints build on one another rather than existing in isolation.
- Closing the gap between design and delivery. Work closely with engineering at the implementation layer, staying active to ensure design intent carries through to production. Be fluent in design tokens, comfortable reading a pull request, and use Figma and GitHub for genuine collaboration.
- Using AI as part of your practice. Incorporate AI tools for rapid prototyping, generative exploration, and bridging the gap between concept and execution. Define best practice rather than waiting for it.
- Owning outcomes, not just outputs. Treat experiences as products, not deliverables. Track performance—player data, retention metrics, qualitative feedback—to identify what to improve next. Operate with a founder‑level sense of accountability for quality and performance.
- Partnering across disciplines. Build trusted relationships across design, editorial, product, and engineering. Speak the language of Creative Directors and engineers with equal fluency, translating the brand’s editorial personality into interaction systems and game experiences that feel unmistakably right for the brand.
- Championing design culture. Model craft, curiosity, and clarity through your work. Set the standard for what “good” looks like, mentor through example, and help raise the collective bar across the wider design organization.
What You’ll Thrive In This Role If
- You have a genuine love for puzzles and games and understand what makes them compelling, habitual, and worth returning to.
- You care deeply about the role of design in building loyalty and emotional connection, not just usability.
- You are an expert in interaction, motion, and feedback—strong instincts for the details that make play satisfying.
- You move easily between the individual moment and the wider ecosystem, understanding how they connect.
- You interrogate briefs, question assumptions, and bring a point of view rather than simply executing what’s asked.
- You are technically fluent: comfortable in Figma, GitHub, design tokens, front‑end constraints, and able to engage engineers at the implementation level.
- You’ve already changed how you work because of AI tools and are curious about what changes next.
- You are outcome‑oriented—care about engagement, retention, and habit formation rather than just the visual review.
- You are a strong communicator: direct, open, and comfortable receiving and giving feedback.
- You are a self‑starter who doesn’t need the path fully defined to move with confidence.
Success Metrics
In your first six months, you’ll build perspective on opportunities within puzzles and games, establish cross‑functional trust, and introduce new ways of working, including AI‑assisted methods, that raise the pace and quality of the team’s output. By the end of the first year, you will have launched at least one game, evolved others, and shown clear impact through engagement numbers and loyalty metrics. You will be a well‑trusted, respected team member, whose point of view on the long‑term direction of Puzzles & Games is clearly grounded, and whose new ways of working are embedded, not mere experiments.
Portfolio Requirements
- Interaction and motion craft—examples of gameplay design, feedback states, transitions, and micro‑interactions that create delight and satisfaction.
- Ecosystem thinking—how you have connected multiple features and moments to drive outcomes; how user touchpoints build on one another to create a wider experience.
- Brand sensitivity—how you interpret and express a brand’s identity and voice across interactive experiences and touchpoints.
- Editorial and games experience—direct puzzles and games experience is preferred but not required; we look for genuinely delightful interactive moments for our brands.
- Implementation quality—evidence that your design intent carried through to production; how you worked with engineers or used tools (Figma, configs, tokens) to protect fidelity.
- Visual judgement—confident hierarchy, rhythm, motion, and composition, with a clear point of view on what “great” looks like.
- Curiosity and progression—signs that you stay current, experiment with new tools and technologies (including AI), and push your craft forward.
- Experience—5+ years in product or interaction design roles.
Benefits
- 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) and extra annual leave for moving house or volunteering.
- Competitive pension scheme, Bupa Private Healthcare, Season ticket loans and eye tests.
- Wellbeing tools: core hours, 10 remote days (from home or a Condé Nast office location), Employee Assistance Programme, corporate gym membership, and cycle‑to‑work scheme.
- Dog‑friendly office and discounts on magazine subscriptions.
- Continuous learning through the Condé Nast Learning Hub—multiple language courses and training.
- Employee Resource Groups—platforms for shared objectives, idea exchange, and community priorities.
Equal Opportunity
Condé Nast is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, familial status and other legally protected characteristics.
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