Head of Design

As Head of Design at 4C Strategies, you will lead a small, distributed team of designers and strengthen our design capability across product experiences, user workflows, and cross-functional collaboration. This is a hands-on leadership role: you are a skilled designer who both leads the team and keeps doing design work yourself, helping the team do their best work. Based in our Stockholm office, you will play a central role in shaping how design contributes to product strategy, customer value, and delivery across our Exonaut platform — our software for readiness and resilience — and related services. This role focuses on our Defence products, designing for armed forces and defence planners.

Responsibilities

Work hands-on as a designer on key Defence product areas, contributing your own craft and raising quality together with the team; Lead and develop the team through regular 1:1s, coaching, feedback, and clear development plans, creating growth opportunities for each designer; Champion design quality, accessibility, and consistency across products, workflows, and customer-facing experiences; Improve design processes, design-system standards, and ways of working across cross-functional teams; Partner closely with Product Managers and Engineering to align user experience, technical feasibility, and business priorities; Turn customer and user insights — from continuous discovery and research — into intuitive, effective products, and measure success through clear outcomes and shared goals; Contribute to product strategy, keeping user-centred thinking at the heart of decisions, and set clear design principles for AI-enabled features (transparency, user control, and safe fallback options); Recruit and onboard designers, and support their growth through our design career framework, building an inclusive and collaborative team culture

Requirements

Experience leading or coaching designers within SaaS, technology, or product-driven organisations; A solid understanding of product design, UX, interaction design, and user-centred methods; Experience building and improving scalable design processes, systems, and governance; Experience collaborating with Product Management and Engineering teams in cross-functional environments; Experience developing designers through coaching, feedback, and regular 1:1s; Comfortable leading a distributed team across different locations and time zones; Clear communication and stakeholder skills, with the ability to build alignment across teams and organisational levels; Ability to balance strategic thinking with operational execution in fast-moving environments; Good organisational skills and the ability to manage several projects at once; High proficiency in English, both written and verbal; Fluent Swedish, both written and spoken; Swedish citizenship, because this role supports defence work and the successful candidate must pass Swedish security vetting (säkerhetsprövning)

Nice to have

Experience working with complex B2B platforms or mission-critical software environments; Familiarity with design systems and scalable product design practices; Experience working in international or multi-disciplinary organisations; Experience supporting organisational change and design maturity growth; Formal education or training within UX, interaction design, service design, or related disciplines

Benefits

Occupational pension (tjänstepension); Wellness allowance (friskvårdsbidrag); Healthcare insurance & healthcare insurance for treatment; Parental pay; Vaccinations; Room to grow into a Director-level design leadership role over time; A supportive, collaborative team building meaningful products for mission-critical work