Director of UX Design
Oda
Oda is a company on the move. We built Norway’s leading online grocery store and now we want to share what we’ve created with the world! Delivering a huge range of high-quality, affordable groceries and fresh produce to millions of doorsteps is a complex process, but we believe we’ve cracked the code. Using data-driven methodology, with a focus on sustainability all the way along the chain, we are building the most efficient retail system in the world. With solid backing from some of the biggest international investors in the world, we’re proud to be one of the fastest growing companies in Europe.
As we’ve grown, our design team has rapidly grown too, now with over 20 designers, including 12 in the areas responsible for the customer-facing sides of our product: the Area we call Shop Platform. To grow further without losing our design culture or quality, and to ensure that designers are thriving as a team, we need a senior and dedicated team leader.
As Director of UX Design, you will have responsibility for the UX designers working across Shop Platform, a “team of teams” that manages nearly all aspects of the digital product that customers’ experience: the apps, the website, communications channels. As we’ve built our entire value chain ourselves, Shop Platform also includes all the back-office workflows and systems we’ve built to manage inventory, customers, orders, and prices.
In Oda, we use an embedded model, with designers working day to day in a cross-functional team, but reporting up through the UX Design discipline. This means this role is much more about long-term people management than day-to-day task management. We expect your wisdom, experience, and amazing people skills will make you a great sparring partner as well as guide the work towards a cohesive vision of our future customer experience.
What you’ll do as Director of UX Design with us
- Manage our UX designers working in Shop Platform teams. Make sure we support, grow and develop talented and passionate individuals in our teams, both in the short and long term. Give designers the space, mandate, tools, and direction they need to thrive. Ensure they have autonomy, mastery and purpose. Build a strong team environment that fosters quality work and good collaboration.
- Hire great people. Make sure we continue to attract and hire the best possible people for all relevant roles within UX Design. We expect the team to roughly double in size over the next 18 months, and we expect to begin to hire outside of Norway. Build a diversegroup of designers that strengthen and extend the abilities of the team.
- Make sure we have a clear and strong point of view of customer value. Ensure everyone in Shop Platform is able to empathize with customers, and how we can continue to deliver the world’s best grocery customer experience. Ensure all designers within the UX Design team adopt the same mindset, and work to make customer empathy and understanding an integral part of everyone’s work.
- Align design work with customer value and company strategy. Help develop an ambitious and articulate point of view for how Oda can deliver a better customer experience that provides even more space for life for our customers. Ensure designers understand how their work connects to customer value and company strategy.
- Build Shop Platform to a world-class, global, team. Together with your partners in Engineering, Product Management, Growth, and Data & Insight, build the organizational structure that enables us to deliver a fantastic customer experience in all markets.
Some personal qualities we think are important to be successful in this role
- A fantastic people person. First and foremost, this is a people role. You should have deep empathy and take immense pride in seeing others thrive and grow.
- Share our values. We take immense care with the culture we are cultivating, and wish to find someone who can help us enrich it, not change it. We have 3 core behaviors: we care about people, we shoot for the stars, and we are here to stay. Progress over perfection, learning, humility, optimism, and guts are also qualities that we value.
- Be a model of cross-functional collaboration. As a leader, we expect you to lead by example how to work with other functions and cultures, including our colleagues in engineering, data & insight, and product management, as well as all our colleagues who rely on the systems Shop Platform builds: the commercial team, growth, customer service, and our new country specific teams.
- Vision combined with exceptional communication skills. You should be a master communicator, both written and orally. You should be great at storytelling, finding a narrative, and getting people onboard. You should be able to walk stakeholders and colleagues through your thought process and guide them to the logical conclusion.
- Ability to thrive in a rapidly growing environment. Oda has very aggressive growth plans in terms of international expansion to new markets and our own hiring plans. This can make things feel unstable at times: While our objectives don’t change from day to day, new people are joining all the time, and we aren’t big on structure for structure’s sake. You should be positive in the face of uncertainty, and use your big-picture mindset to calm the noise.
- Have a passion for food. Food, and helping families feed themselves, is our reason for being. While you won’t be judged on your cooking skills, it doesn’t hurt to find our medium—food—exciting.
The following will probably be helpful
- 10+ years professional design experience. While this is not a hands-on design role, your experience as a designer will have you understand natively the mindset, capabilities, and challenges of designers.
- 4+ years directly hiring and managing designers. Ideally in an environment similar to ours: in-house tech scale-up.
- Experience building and shipping consumer software products, ideally around e-commerce, data-driven experimentation, or platforms
- Fluency in English. Fluency in Norwegian, Finnish, or German would be a welcomed plus
What we offer
- The chance to take a leadership role in a rapidly scaling consumer tech company, with global plans and a mission aimed at improving the sustainability of the world’s food chain
- A great company culture that values kindness, team work, learning, and work/life balance.
- A design-mature organization, where customer experience is seen as everyone’s responsibility, and design’s mandate is to to keep that focus
- A vibrant and strong UX design team made up of service designers, digital designers, writers, and researchers
- A product that customers love and really makes a difference in their lives
- A custom way of working that is designed to help us focus and build great things (read about flow here)
- Vibrant and collaboration-friendly office spaces in Oslo
- The possibility of buying shares to take part in the success of Oda
- Help with relocating to Norway, if needed
As a part of Oda you’ll will be working with enthusiastic, skilled and ambitious people, shaping tomorrow’s shopping experience. Come build the future with us!
If you’d like to know more about how we work, check out our stories on Medium. We look forward to hearing from you!