Director of Product Design

TITLE: Director of Product Design

DEPARTMENT: Engineering

REPORTS TO: Chief Product Officer

About the Role

As the Director, Product Design, you’ll work with our product team and engineering team as well as cross-functional partners such as marketing, customer experience, and internal operations teams. You’ll ensure a consistent and high-quality user experience for both consumers as well as internal users while creating repeatable systems and guides that help design scale across the organization.

When applying for this role, please provide a link to your portfolio featuring examples of your product design work and thinking. Don’t forget to include any passwords needed to access your portfolio!

How You’ll Make a Difference 

• Build and manage our product design team.  Hire the best, lead with a well-communicated vision, provide supportive coaching, and guide individuals along deliberate career development paths.
• In the near term, you’ll be a player/coach, directly owning and executing projects in addition to being a people manager.
• Work cross-functionally with product, data, marketing, engineering, and operations partners to represent the design team, facilitate design discussions, and give feedback in planning and product channels.
• Think holistically about complex systems, empathize with customers, and understand business objectives to create compelling and effective product experiences.
• Develop user-centered design solutions based on research, member insights, and industry best practices.
• Partner with product to help define and execute research initiatives to guide the direction of your design work as well as inform business strategy.
• Present design concepts and clearly communicate design intent through design specs and presentation documents.
• Articulate, negotiate, and refine design requirements in collaboration with product managers and engineers to arrive at the best design solutions.
• Own and iterate on our design system, advocating for scalable design solutions across product, brand, and marketing.

Who You Are

• 10+ years of relevant experience in user experience design in a product-driven company.
• 3+ years of experience hiring and directly managing other designers.
• Demonstrated ability to lead the conception and prototyping of brand new products as well as feature enhancements, all with a user-centered design process.
• You have a user and data-informed design mentality. You are constantly looking to hone your team’s instincts through user feedback and data insights.
• Deep experience conceiving of, planning, and executing user research projects.
• Strong ability to communicate in writing to concisely share insights and effectively lay out a case for a course of action.
• Experience designing for both web and mobile.  Familiarity with unique technical and usability constraints when designing for desktop and mobile.

Our Culture

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential values at Thistle. We know we do our best and most impactful work when we feel we are represented and belong. We're proud to actively recruit and hire talented people from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences.  We do not discriminate against employees or applicants for employment on any legally recognized basis (“protected class”), including, but not limited to, race, ethnicity, citizenship, national origin, color, hairstyles, hair texture, religion or religious creed, age, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, veteran or active military status, marital status, criminal record, genetics, retaliation, sexual harassment or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.