Product Design Director
Upside
Posted 3 years ago
We are an ambitious, well-funded startup with plans to change a $1 trillion-dollar global industry. This is no ordinary startup. We have a proven management team that has done it before, done it before together, and done it before in the travel industry. The company is overflowing with fiercely intelligent people who have tons of energy and an upbeat view of the future. We all act like owners and we get a huge kick out doing great work and doing it fast. We like it even more when we come up with a fresh way to solve a problem. Above all, we are devoted to solving customer problems, because that’s at the center of everything we do.
The Director, Product Design represents design to the organization and is a voice for their products inside and outside the company - articulating vision, evangelizing success, and sharing progress.
ABOUT YOU
- You have 10-15 years experience leading design teams in an entrepreneurial, startup or agency environment
- You have recruited, interviewed and hired high performing designers and design teams
- You are enthusiastic about creating an unmatched user experience
- You possess skills and experience in user research, ideation, information architecture and product definition and an online portfolio of work demonstrating UI/UX design capabilities
- You embody design thinking and know how to drive designers to deliver impactful experience
- You can lead through ambiguity and shift in product and design direction
- You naturally collaborate with product and engineering in a continuous delivery environment
- You possess the soft skills to persuade and build alignment: listening, consensus-building, decision-making
- You are a champion for your team members - individually and collectively - as well as your customers
- You have experience in leading a creative team through a period of high growth, with a strong focus on goal-setting, scale and measuring effectiveness
- Up-to-date with the latest UX trends, techniques, and technologies
- Experience with Sketch, prototyping tools such as Invision and Figma, Adobe Creative Suite a plus
- Experience using personas, journey mapping, design thinking to communicate with stakeholders
ABOUT THE GIG
- Create a strong design vision for our product in partnership with Product leadership
- Evangelize the design organization inside and outside the design team, helping peers understand what it takes to be design-driven and deliver great experiences
- Craft your group’s strategic roadmap and design vision, informed with insights and opportunities, through collaboration with cross-functional peers
- Define the organizational structure of the design team including product designers, researchers and UX writer ensuring unity across disparate work streams while building a culture that elevates the team’s performance and morale
- Facilitate continuous learning and improvements, both of designer's careers and product work through launching experiments and iterating
- Recruit, hire and onboard outstanding design talent
- Establish philosophy and mindset for how the design team approaches its work
- Own the methodological toolkit, making sure it is shared, understood and used throughout the team
- Create a variety of design assets to communicate your concepts to a broad range of partners
- Be accountable for high quality design practices. This includes participation in all aspects of UX: research, ideation, strategy, interaction design, information architecture and visual design
ABOUT US
We are positive, passionate, playful, and always pushing to be better. Our team is a hodgepodge of challenge seekers, travel gurus, startup junkies, and data-miners who see the big picture.
YOU WANT TO TALK TO US IF…
You are motivated by disrupting the norm.
You have a great sense of humor and take your profession seriously, but not yourself.
Your entrepreneurial spirit drives your bias for action.
You are all about constructive feedback - you can dish it out and you can take it.
You thrive in the frenetic energy of a startup.
WHAT WE OFFER
Competitive salary + equity
Full health, vision, and dental coverage
Professional development stipend
401K plan
Open paid time off
Dog-friendly office
Upside Travel is an equal opportunity employer and encourages people of all backgrounds, genders, ethnicities, abilities, and sexual orientations to apply. We are committed to being an inclusive place to work, while maintaining a workforce that represents the communities we serve.