Design Manager, Fintech

We know that travel means more than booking a hotel room or flight. The dreams you have and the plans you make. The places you visit, the sights you see, the journeys you take. The people you meet and the friends you make. The taste of new foods and the feel of clean, crisp white sheets. There are countless moments that shape every travel experience and we seek designers who can help curate and guide those moments to make every part of travel easy and enjoyable.

At Booking.com, data informs our design and business decisions. Technology is at our core. But our company is more than datasets, lines of code, or A/B tests. Our people are our biggest assets. Innovation and creativity are at hand. Through our products, partners and people, we strive to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, be that through unique and remote homes, luxury hotel accommodations, long-term stays, compelling loyalty and reward programs, transportation and flight bookings, curating the connecting trip. Come help us make it happen

We value Diversity of all types and in an open, dynamic workplace. This has been a pillar at Booking.com since day one, and something we continue to strongly believe in and build today. Diversity is our strength. Booking.com is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment.

Join us in Amsterdam as a Design Manager, and be a part of the fast-growing UX organization in Booking.com’s FinTech business unit. FinTech is an ever-changing, complex, and extremely exciting industry. Booking.com provides FinTech products to a diverse range of over 2 million accommodation providers. And as part of the team, you will take the forefront in solving real-world problems for our customers.

Booking.com's mission is to “Make it easier for everyone to experience the world”. The FinTech organization takes a central role in achieving this goal by providing an easy to use, secure and regulated marketplace and fintech products which enhance the trip experience for all our customers.

More specifically, you will be a craft leader for the team responsible for designing best-in-class experiences for accommodation and trip providers through our reliable and innovative fintech products.

As a Design Manager in the B2B side of Booking.com's FinTech Business Unit, you'll lead multiple teams that enable accommodation and trip providers to operate an easy-to-use, secure, and regulated online payments through our payments platform, as well as offer innovative fintech products to support the growth of their businesses.

Design Managers at Booking.com bring strong design craft capabilities and strong leadership skills. With a deep commitment to the discipline of management, the career development needs of their direct reports, and overall organizational health. Their primary focus is on empowering their teams to do their best work rather than doing practical design work as an individual contributor.

They have a clear understanding of the needs of the business and our customers as well as a strong understanding of the market. They are able to work effectively to empower their teams to balance these needs while ensuring the individual contributors in their team have a clear understanding of expectations around craft, stakeholder management, and commercial awareness. A strong design manager at Booking.com leads by example, inspires their team, and is comfortable setting a vision and roadmap that fellow leaders and organizations can buy into.

As a Design Manager in this area, your teams will lead the evolution of Booking.com’s payments product, Payments by Booking.com, to meet the needs of an ever-changing market landscape, spanning a diverse portfolio of accommodation and trip providers. You will also lead teams that are working towards providing these providers with reliable and innovative fintech products that support their growth and provide a best-in-class customer experience.

Coaching and mentorship

• • Coaches and mentors individual designers to improve craft, deliverables, communication, and career advancement.
  • Evaluates and elevates process and craft through critique, review, or other measurable steps.
  • Helps reports prioritize work, ensuring focus and right work/life balance.
  • Works with individuals and groups to define clear and measurable day-to-day, quarterly, and longer-term goals, aligned with business and stakeholder needs.

Team Management

• • Identifies headcount needs for designers aligned to track or business objectives.
  • Works with business and design stakeholders to assess gaps and acquire resources.
  • Coordinates with HR and Central Design in order to recruit and interview candidates for identified roles.
  • Owns workability and long-term illness cases with the assistance of the Senior Design Manager. 

Stakeholder Management

• • Manages stakeholders, processes, business priorities and projects, as well as the ability to influence and guide individuals.
  • Networks across multiple teams, departments and disciplines as necessary to build relationships and achieve objectives and manage dependencies and stakeholders.

Leadership

Oversees team deliverables, allocation, performance, progression. 

• • Is able to lead in ambiguous situations, with less or fragmented data, lack of decision support.

Community

• • Actively engages with other managers and departments in order to improve management processes, contribute to overall performance evaluation and improvement

• • Acts as a subject matter expert on product design and product design processes, as well as their product area or business topic.
  • Guides the department's leadership, product, and UX team members in appropriate ways to create, validate, and implement appropriate user-centered UX strategies, prototypes, UX solutions, and hypotheses through reviews and quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods.

Guidance

• • Advances reports’ understanding and application of user-centered design concepts, methods, and techniques to enable and advance quality design and outcomes. 
  • Coaches on related communication, presentation, negotiation, and influence techniques. 
  • Encourages data-led, not data-governed, decision making.

Feedback Culture

• • Encourages and enables their direct reports in facilitating workshops, sprints, critiques, reviews, or other collaborative processes across teams or tracks in order to engage direct reports, peers, and key stakeholders and in order to foster growth and improvement.

Systems

• • Champions an advanced understanding of Booking’s brand, copy and design standards, systems, and guidelines and their use across the work of their teams. 
  • Works with design leadership and others to ensure product, craft, quality, and accessibility standards and requirements are applied across their reports’ tracks, teams and products.
  • Develops and drives improvement or implementation plans to relevant design systems and design principles.

Future-oriented

• • Demonstrates and shares awareness of current and upcoming trends in market, technology and design.

• 5+ years’ experience delivering global products in a similar large scale product led environment
• 1-3 years of successfully managing and mentoring designers in multidisciplinary teams
• Strong interpersonal skills
• Strong work ethic; self-directed and resourceful
• Solution-oriented and result-driven
• Proactive, flexible and capable of working independently as well as working as part of a UX and leadership team
• Extensive knowledge of current design processes, software, tools and techniques 

• Experience working with a broad spectrum of designers and design deliverables, from brand implementation to visual design to interaction design and UI/IA
• Knowledge of Lean UX, Lean startup, Design Thinking, and agile
• Experience working in Banking, Scaled FinTechs or B2B Financial Regulatory Technology 

Design roles are open to qualified candidates worldwide. Our headquarters are located in one of the most vibrant cities in Europe, Amsterdam. We also have offices in London and Manchester. We provide assistance for you and your family with a generous relocation package, ensuring a smooth transition to working and living in Europe. We have successfully relocated 300+ technology professionals to Amsterdam in the last year.

• Contributing to a high scale, complex, world renowned product and seeing real-time impact of your work on millions of travellers worldwide
• Working in a fast-paced and performance driven culture
• We aim to empower you to do your best work, whether in the office or at home, as well as 20 days per year to work from abroad with our Work from Abroad benefit* (subject to terms and conditions)
• Opportunity to utilise technical expertise, leadership capabilities and entrepreneurial spirit
• Promote and drive impactful and innovative engineering solutions
• Technical, behavioural and interpersonal competence advancement via on-the-job opportunities, experimental projects, hackathons, conferences and active community participation
• Need more flexibility in your work week? We are happy to consider part-time, and reduced working week opportunities* (min. 32 hours per week, subject to terms and conditions)
• Parental Leave: From day one of your employment with us, we offer 22 weeks’ fully paid leave for all new parents, regardless of gender or the way you become a parent
• Care Leave: 10 days’ fully paid leave per year for colleagues who are caring for ill family members.
• Competitive compensation and benefits package and some great added perks of working in the home city of Booking.com

Pre-Employment Screening:

If your application is successful, your personal data may be used for a pre-employment screening check by a third party as permitted by applicable law. Depending on the vacancy and applicable law, a pre-employment screening may include employment history, education and other information (such as media information) that may be necessary for determining your qualifications and suitability for the position.