Meet the design team sparking Zalando’s imagination
Do you feel at home in the undefined problem space? Find out what it’s like to work at The Studio, one of Zalando’s most dynamic product design teams.
In product design, the wider the scope of a problem, the harder it can be to grasp. Words on a page can only go so far to describe the customer experience, and every mind paints a different picture. That’s why, at Zalando, we have a team dedicated to sparking the imagination. The Studio loves nothing more than transforming ambiguity into actionability; raw potential into opportunity; ideas into vision.
The Studio tackles a wide range of topics — from those that require the alignment of multiple teams, to opportunities that are just on the horizon and need to be investigated and explored. By applying the design process, the diverse team focuses on the customer and partner perspective, collaborating with product management, business development, and engineering to strategically shape it into a tangible proposal.
Since its inception in 2015, The Studio has been the pivotal drawing board for many of Zalando’s strategic initiatives — from the content creator platform, Collabary, to Sustainability and Design Systems, all of which have developed into independent teams. In 2021, The Studio collaborated with the Size & Fit team to help unlock the potential of Zalando’s new body measurement technology. The teams worked together to define what customer benefits we could offer beyond reliable size advice, in order to draft the team’s customer experience vision for the coming three years.
“Working at The Studio has the benefits of the agency or consultancy life, like a fast pace and a constant supply of new topics,” says Head of Product Design, Shruti Ramiah. “Meanwhile, being rooted in a mature product organization allows you to deepen your knowledge over time. You have the added satisfaction of being able to watch your work come to life, even if you’re not the one doing the final delivery.”
What does the team love most about working at The Studio, and what expertise does each designer bring? Meet Head of Product Design, Shruti Ramiah, Senior Product Designer, Michael Feeney, and Principal Product Designers, Annette Lay and Israel Martin.
Shruti Ramiah
Head of Product Design
I like to think of The Studio team like a band; no two people are alike, and we all play a special ‘instrument’, but together we can make great music! We match people to projects based on their skills, strengths, interests, and learning goals. We’re a tight team. Every Friday afternoon, we get together to share our work or something that’s inspired us. It’s an open space to chat, connect and decompress before we go into the weekend.
Building empathy and understanding of our customers and stakeholders is the deep skill I bring to The Studio team. The moment we translate customer insights into strategy and design solutions; that is where I am really in my element! My former work in strategic design consulting at IDEO helped me to hone that craft.
Michael Feeney
Senior Product Designer
At work, I like to touch on different themes, learn about new topics, and expand my skill set. That is exactly what I get from The Studio. Since I joined the team, in mid-2021, I have worked on projects around tooling, internal communication, B2B, B2C, inspiration, branding, and more. Constant learning is integral to many other positions, but at The Studio, it is truly on another level. Another plus is that working on so many different projects has allowed me to meet, and work, with people from different teams and departments at Zalando. This helps to give me a wider perspective of the company as a whole.
My professional background is in more traditional graphic design. I have worked in advertising, as an art director, and in digital design studios. I joined Zalando four and a half years ago. For most of that time, I worked on our visual language as part of the Zalando Design System team. At The Studio, I can wear my editorial or marketing hat if I need to, while also putting my product design skills to work. Being able to navigate both worlds makes it easier for me to collaborate with different teams, and to tackle certain projects where branding, strategy, or marketing skills are needed.
Annette Lay
Principal Product Designer
I love the people. The Studio attracts a certain type of creative human. Each of us is unique in our capabilities, experience, and personality, but if I had to break down the values we share it would be these:
1. Pragmatic idealism — Tackling sticky problems can be a tricky place to be. Lack of clarity calls for a hopeful and positive attitude; a way to look at a problem as a possibility rather than a wall.
2. Vulnerability & empathy — We’ve created a culture within The Studio where we are transparent about how we feel. We take care of each other.
3. A little bit of disco — Anyone who loves disco as a genre knows that there is funk in the music, and wisdom in the lyrics.
My education was originally in graphic design (Rhode Island School of Design). Throughout my career I’ve worked at a few different agencies, focusing on fashion advertising, building brand narratives, and organizational transformation — all of this mostly in New York. I’m also a healer, practicing reiki/energy work, and I do feel that working with energy really helps me to understand people in a deeper way. I feel that authentic relationships are key to doing any work. This means helping people to feel seen so that you can better collaborate, create and design futures with them.
Israel Martin
Principal Product Designer
We are working in a very preliminary space where we have the ability to find inspiration from multiple external sources and reshape it within a new scenario. This hybrid shape might not exist yet elsewhere, neither is it guaranteed to work, but it allows us to ideate with more plasticity without committing to a solution too fast. This means that our team has a lot of optimism towards what could be there. We often ask ourselves, ‘What would happen if we did this? What might we discover there?’ So there is a lot of playfulness involved, and a lot of time spent putting our heads together. As a result, we all have really open hearts, and we are not afraid to share our thoughts or deep feelings. It creates a very safe and genuine culture between us, and leads us into conversations about different aspects of our lives.
I studied degrees in Fine Arts and Media Studies in Barcelona, London and Chile. I have expertise in interaction design, but also in cultural studies. For the majority of my career, I have worked in creative agencies, in very international spaces, such as Tel Aviv, Shanghai and, of course, Berlin. I’m able to navigate different perspectives and disciplines, which is required for our team to see the bigger picture. I also do a lot of video editing when we are building project possibilities, which connects with UX and UI prototyping to visualize the stories we are building.
Join the team
The Studio is currently looking for more strategic design minds to join the team, who are interested, above all, in exploring fuzzy problems. “You should be excited about the discovery and definition phases,” explains Shruti. “Working at The Studio is a great opportunity to deepen your strategic design skills, going to the heart of aligning customer-business-technology challenges. Perhaps you’ve done this before in an agency or entrepreneurial environment. One of the particularities of The Studio is that we need to get creative with the design process itself. We look for people who feel so stable and confident in the design process that they are comfortable adjusting and adapting it to the fluid work that we do.”
Does this sound like a challenge that would energize and inspire you? The Studio is recruiting for a Product Design Manager and Senior and Principal Product Designers.
