Senior Product Designer

Senior Product Designer (Remote)

Join our remote, distributed team and bring world-class product design to our exceptional software engineering work with top publishers like Heavy.com and tech companies like Google. Enjoy a collaborative and supportive work environment, schedule flexibility and trust, and the chance to play an important role in helping XWP create exceptional products and client experiences.

Role Summary

The Senior Product Designer is responsible for designing the interactions and interfaces people use to engage with the products we build, helping both users and our clients achieve their objectives and have a delightful experience. In practice this means working with our clients and engineering teams to understand and define the problem, users, and context, and to design a solution iteratively and collaboratively from concept to prototype to high fidelity, engineering-ready designs and design requirements.

Areas of Focus

• Lead (or support) user research, synthesize findings, and share with product teams and clients
• Lead UX/UI problem-solving collaboration with product teams and clients
• Design interaction and interface concepts and prototypes, test and iterate
• Create high-fidelity, engineering-ready designs and support their implementation

Accountabilities

• Participate in the discovery process to understand the problem, users and their objectives, client and their objectives
• Facilitate discussion and ideation with the Product Owner, Project Architect, wider product team and client to identify possible solutions
• Create artifacts (questions, user journey maps, visual concepts and prototypes) to aid in user research studies and client validation
• Iterate on ideas to arrive at a solution (interaction and visual design) with team and client buy-in
• Create high fidelity designs and design documentation for the engineering team to implement the interactions and interface
• Support the engineering team as needed through implementation
• Advocate and design for accessibility
• Follow Agile methodologies
• Estimate effort to complete planned design work
• Support the development and improvement of design processes and best practices
• Participate in our design community and help grow our design expertise
• Be a supportive team member and leader
• Be candid and respectful
• Maintain a growth mindset

Evaluation

Here are ways your design contributions to our clients and team will be evaluated:

• Have you been an active participant in and valuable contributor to the discovery and planning process with clients and the engineering teams?
• Have your design efforts met the needs of the project timelines?
• Have you communicated proactively with the team and client, including as any changes in timeline or direction arose?
• Have you taken responsibility for any mistakes that you may have made and worked with the team to resolve them?
• Have your contributions built trust with your teammates and clients?
• Are you continually working on ways to improve your skillset as a designer?
• Do you treat others with respect and lead by example?

Payscale

This is a mid to senior-level role, with a typical pay range of USD $50 to $75 per hour for contractors or a salary for employees of $90,000 to $120,000 with benefits, depending on proven experience level and engagement terms.

Work Environment

You’ll be joining a remote-first, distributed team of over 50 people hailing from 5 continents, including Project Managers, Product Owners, Architects & Engineers, Quality Analysts, UX Architects & Designers. Enjoy benefits including:

• Trust and support from your colleagues (we look out for each other as we work towards a shared purpose)
• The rewards of a highly collaborative culture (we’re a team, not a working group)
• The joys of remote work: schedule flexibility, skip the commute, more time for family and interests outside of work
• The chance to play an important part in helping XWP achieve its full potential and make a meaningful difference for our clients, team members and the WordPress community

Job requirements

Must-haves:

• Servant-leadership approach to team members and clients
• Proven (3+ years) experience leading the product design process
• Strong proficiency designing with collaborative tools (e.g. Figma)
• Deep experience creating visual concepts and testing them with users
• Deep experience creating engineering-ready visual designs for web and mobile
• Ability to work effectively as a solo designer or as part of a design team
• Experience with agile methodologies (e.g. Scrum, Kanban, Lean UX)

Preferred:

• Proven effectiveness engaging with remote, distributed teams
• Experience designing themes and editorial workflows for WordPress
• Experience working with major technology companies and publishers
• Experience collaborating on projects in Github and Atlassian’s Jira
• Interest in participating in and passion for giving back to the WordPress community

You will also want to have these characteristics:

• Highly organized, motivated, and execution-oriented
• Self-starter comfortable working in a highly technical environment
• Demonstrated ability for continuous learning, creativity, and problem-solving
• A bias for clarity and alignment, proactively reaching out to teammates and/or clients to address uncertainties and realign as needed.
• Ability to work effectively and dependably in a remote position