Principal Craft Lead UX

Define what design becomes when AI co-designs the rules

By ensuring the designers who shape the customer experience are on top of the latest technology and embrace it to innovate their craft. AI is changing what designers build, how fast engineers move, and what ‘good design’ entails. All before the first draft for a new initiative is even generated, let alone drawn. As the Principal Craft Lead for UX, you answer a question that has vexed us so far: what should ‘product design at bol’ entail in 2028, and beyond? You’ll define that future, build toward it, and ensure design remains a high-impact craft in a world where the boundaries between design, product, and engineering are shifting in real time.

The biggest challenge

You have an explicit mandate from the CPTO Management Team to lead this transformation. At the same time, the Heads of Design do not report to you, so you need to inspire and commit them. This means your ‘authority’ derives from craft credibility, from having a sharper view of where the discipline is heading than anyone else in the room, and from creating frameworks that make people want to align. How can you preserve a distinct and impactful design craft while actively modernizing it? AI-assisted engineering outpaces traditional design workflows. As of yet, using AI to generate design artefacts results in generic output that doesn't always fit the problem we are trying to solve or the context of the product. Can you innovate (y)our way around that conundrum, without stirring up a ‘counter revolution’?

What you will do

You’ll operate at the same level as the Heads of Craft for Engineering, Product, and Product Analytics. And, like them, you’ll operate cross-domain, cross-functional, and without a safety net of direct authority. You’ll work closely with the Heads of Design, Product Design Managers, and Staff Designers across all domains, alongside the UX Research Manager to keep design and research in sync, and with the Craft Enablement team to translate direction into momentum and adoption. You’ll also join the UX Management Team. Your focus is not on maintaining the craft, but on evolving it.

In practice:

• Define what design at bol needs to become and own the roadmap to get us there asap
• Collaborate with Engineering, Product, and Product Analytics leadership to shape how cross-functional teams and builder profiles evolve as craft boundaries blur
• Develop design principles, quality standards, tooling, and ways of working that give Heads of Design a common foundation without adding bureaucratic overhead
• Keep design and research tightly coupled in practice, regardless of where formal responsibilities lie in the org structure
• Represent design in cross-craft governance decisions on tooling, team composition, and ways of working
• Translate craft direction into scalable enablement in partnership with PP&O. You set the direction, they execute.

Why you can make a difference

You’ve led design through a major technology shift before. Not by simply introducing new tools, but by fundamentally and enthusiastically rethinking how the craft could operate. You’re not observing the AI transition from a safe distance. You’re in the thick of it: experimenting with AI design tools, forming grounded opinions on what works, what doesn’t, and what that means for how designers should spend their time. You can have a substantive conversation with a Staff Designer about interaction quality and walk straight into a meeting with Engineering leadership about how team structures should evolve. You have experience shaping design practice across multiple domains or business units at scale. And you understand that in a role without direct authority, your most important asset is the ability to set a direction people choose to follow.

3 reasons why this is (not) for you

You are:

• Craft provocateur — When the evidence says cherished design processes or tools no longer earn their place, you engage ‘kill your darlings’ mode.
• Influence architect — Mandates don’t move organizations. Trust does. You inspire craft credibility that makes people align before you’ve finished your sentence.
• Frontier thinker — You’re invested in the AI transition. Your opinions are sharpened by practice, your claims are backed by empirical observations and hard data.

You are not:

• Framework curator — Your portfolio comprises elegant, comprehensive design methods and workflows that nobody ever adopted.
• Comfortably numb — You thrive when you can tinker with established processes, making micro-improvements that won’t upset anyone.
• Current craft purist — The idea that design might look fundamentally different three years from now feels like an existential threat. That threat will never materialize on your watch.

Where you'll be working

You’ll join the UX MT and operate across all of bol’s product domains to improve a platform that serves 14 million customers and 43,300 partners, where design decisions land hard and at scale. The environment is genuinely in transition: AI is reshaping how product teams work, and bol moves faster than the average agency. You won’t inherit a finished vision for design. You’ll establish one.