Principal / Lead Product Designer

💡Location: Toronto, Canada

💡Duration: 6 to 12 months contract, with potential for extension

💡Experience Level: 10–15 years

Role Overview:

We are seeking an experienced Principal Product Designer to join Foolproof on a 6-to-12-month contract to lead strategic product initiatives in the sustainability and environmental impact space. This role will shape and deliver innovative products and services that help organizations achieve their ESG, net-zero, and sustainable growth objectives.

You will work across cross-functional teams and client stakeholders to define the product vision, roadmap, and delivery plans that embed sustainability at the core of strategy and execution.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define and drive product and experience strategy across large, ambiguous problem spaces, with a strong focus on transforming complex, data-rich ecosystems into simple, scalable, and user-friendly experiences.
• Strategic Leadership: Define and drive product strategy that aligns with sustainability goals and measurable impact outcomes.
• Sustainability Expertise: Translate sustainability frameworks (e.g., ESG reporting, circular economy, carbon reduction) into actionable product initiatives.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Collaborate with sustainability leads, business stakeholders, and technical teams to define and prioritize sustainable product opportunities.
• Product Vision & Delivery: Lead the design and delivery of digital products and services that support responsible business practices and long-term resilience.
• Innovation & Research: Identify emerging sustainability trends and technologies, and integrate them into product discovery and development processes.
• Establish and scale design systems, frameworks, and patterns while guiding when and how teams should extend beyond existing systems to meet evolving product and business needs.
• Tackle system-level challenges—including AI-powered and data-intensive experiences—using systems thinking and a forward-looking perspective on how emerging technologies shape user interactions.
• Mentor, coach, and elevate design teams while championing design excellence, setting a high bar for modern, high-quality design craft, and advocating for design’s strategic impact with senior and executive stakeholders.

Required Experience:

• 10–15 years of product management experience, including senior or principal-level roles.
• Experience with products in sustainability-focused domains, such as energy, mobility, supply chain, circular economy, or ESG data and reporting.
• Deep understanding of sustainability frameworks, including SDGs, net-zero strategies, carbon accounting, or ESG principles.
• Ability to bridge the gap between business strategy, environmental objectives, and user experience.
• Strong communication and facilitation skills, with experience influencing senior stakeholders.
• Experience working with agile design methodologies.

Nice to Have:

• Experience consulting with Fortune 500 or global enterprise clients on sustainability or ESG transformation.
• Knowledge of sustainability reporting standards such as GRI, SASB, TCFD, or GHG Protocol.
• Familiarity with impact measurement tools, lifecycle analysis, or sustainable innovation frameworks.
• Background in digital transformation or service design projects with environmental or social impact.

Our methodology:

Discover, imagine, create and deliver products and services that make things better for our clients, their customers, their employees and the world.

Bring together insight, creativity and technology to deliver experiences that transform our clients’ businesses.

Outcome driven, embody objectivity and people-centricity in everything we do.

Continuous discovery, delivery and learning through a collaborative, iterative design process.

Champion experimentation, conceptual thinking and creative expression in design.

Thought leadership in experience, design, branding and design systems through contributing to conferences and industry panels.

Who we are:

Foolproof is a product and service design company. We bring together insight, creativity and technology to design, engineer and market experiences. With studios in the UK, North America, India and South Africa, we operate globally.

To deliver creative and technological change we partner with our parent company Zensar, a leading digital and technology solutions provider and Indigo Slate, our sister Studio, who specialise in marketing and consultancy. Together, we bring digital transformation programmes to life for major brands.

We're welcoming new talent into the Foolproof fold and want to ensure it’s just as diverse as the world around us. That's why we want to hear from everyone regardless of background, identity or ability. Different perspectives make us who we are and our work a success.

Our values:

We aspire to the qualities of intelligence, drive humility and imagination, they defines us as individuals, as teams and as one business and moves us from being good to great. You can read more about the kind of people we are and the behaviours we exhibit here:

https://www.foolproof.co.uk/culture/

Indigo Slate is a full-service human experience company. We are a digital organization backed by a global engineering leader, and we’re dedicated to helping clients build transformative experiences from start to finish. We create smart experiences that deliver powerful results through a profound intersection of marketing, technology, business, and creative. We understand that brands are no longer judged through their advertising, but through each touchpoint, both internal and external, building strength with every experience.

At Indigo Slate, we harness a mix of skills unique in our industry—equal parts strategic consultancy, creative agency, and technology thought leadership—to build and run some of the best experiences on the planet.