Product Designer

Hi, I’m Brad, founder and CEO of Delicious Brains Inc. We make high quality products for WordPress developers.

The “we” is currently 6 full-time developers, two full-time marketers, and myself. I have some design experience myself and have managed to get by ok designing our products on my own over the past 5 years. But now I need to focus more on the big picture. Plus, having a great product designer onboard will have a major positive impact on the business.

We are a design-lead company. We do wireframing internally (the developers and I collaborate on them) and we outsource the later design phases to freelance designers. It’s been working OK, but I know the results would be mind-blowingly better if we had a great product designer involved from the earlier stages.

I’m looking for a great product designer who can work with us full-time (30-37.5 hours per week) and is excited about the prospect of joining a small but growing remote company.

I personally review all applications myself.

Not only are you a great product designer, you’re a designer in a broad sense. You admire and appreciate well-designed things, whether it be a building, a bridge, a car, or a laptop stand. You die a little inside when you have to buy something that is poorly designed. You follow, admire, and engage with other talented designers.

You have extensive experience designing web apps. You’ve engaged with customers and analyzed data to determine if your designs are effective. You’ve collaborated with a team of developers and are confident participating in technical discussions.

“When your favorite tool is a hammer, then all you see is nails.”

That saying does not describe you. Although you’re a talented visual designer, you’re acutely aware that “more paint” is not always the solution. You apply visual design very carefully and intentionally. You prioritize simplicity and user experience over visual design and strive for just the right balance.

You’re curious and love to learn. You look forward to meetings with developers and are energized by technical conversations.

Although you often need people to help you generate ideas and formulate a plan of attack on a project, you do your best work in isolation without interruption. You’re proactive in tackling things that need to be done without direction.

You embrace the opportunity to level up, learn something new and really dig into it. You’re a disciplined worker and have no trouble getting work done at home on any given day.

You’re exceptional at communicating in writing via instant message, email, etc. You’re ok on the phone and video chat too. You understand that excellent communication is part of what makes a team work better together and clear, concise written communication is how remote teams thrive. Sharing a design deliverable without explaining its context or what you need from the team is unheard of in your world.

You own both your successes and your failures. You practice Extreme Ownership. When a project you’re leading turns into a disaster, you own it and you learn from it. You never point the finger at others.

You welcome criticism and genuinely want to grow as a professional. We’re big on pushing each other to be better. That’s how we grow as individuals and a team. It’s one thing to accept criticism and another to ask for it and use it to level up.

You enjoy moving quickly on projects. We’re a small team with big ambitions which means we have a lot that we want to do. We need our new ideas to move to execution quickly so we can determine whether to invest more time in them or change course. You thrive in an environment where things move swiftly and dread being the person who slows down the team. That being said, you never let the speed of execution impact the quality of your work.

Although your primary role will be to design our products, as the only designer in the company you will work on all-things design. At first we will work closely, but once we establish trust you will operate with complete autonomy and make high level design decisions on your own, reporting to me on a weekly basis. Your responsibilities will include:

What’s an attractive benefits package? Well, it really depends on the person. What do you value?

Maybe a competitive salary is what you’re after. Or maybe you really value vacation time and would rather less pay and more vacation days. Maybe health coverage is important to you, or maybe you’re already covered.

Because everyone values things differently, I’m leaving this wide open. Carte blanche. I’m certain we can work out an arrangement you’ll be happy with.

Here are some of the benefits everyone gets:

For the birth or adoption of a child, DBI offers 100% paid leave of 8 weeks for primary caregivers and 3 weeks leave for secondary caregivers. Contractors may choose to take an additional 8 weeks unpaid leave and Canadian employees may choose to take unpaid leave in accordance with the employment laws of their province.

Although six of your work hours need to overlap with mine in the beginning (as mentioned above), we can do with less overlap once we’ve worked together for a while. You’ll be free to work from nearly anywhere in the world, wherever you’re happiest. Our team is currently distributed across the globe, working from our homes in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Scotland, and England. As long as you continue to overlap with Atlantic hours, your specific location doesn’t matter to us. ?

The entire team was flown into Jamaica for the annual company retreat in May 2018. Previous destinations have included Halifax, Miami and Vienna. Food/drink, travel, and accommodation were covered. Check out our retreat blog posts for the details. Where will we go in 2019!?

You’ll also have the flexibility to sleep in every day or get up at the crack of dawn. Work a couple hours in the morning and a couple in the evening. It really doesn’t matter as long as we overlap by six hours most days in the beginning and after a while it will be completely up to you.

We are launching two new products in the first quarter of 2019: a third WordPress plugin called WP Offload SES and a new SaaS app called SpinupWP (currently in beta). The plan for the future is to build more products and grow the business that way. As the first designer in a growing company, you can imagine the career growth opportunities ahead!

I look forward to personally reviewing your application.