Senior Product Designer

Senior Product Designer Overview

The Senior Product Designer role at Very Good Ventures drives design on programs. They lead and execute design activities on projects, own design outputs, and collaborate extensively with internal and external teams. Wherever possible they are the primary representative of design vision and decision making with client stakeholders. They work to ensure the experiences VGV delivers are smart, beautiful, and fit the needs and objectives of our clients and their users.

Responsibilities:Discovery

The Senior Product Designer role helps drive the team’s understanding of challenges and experience opportunities within a project.

Expect to:

• Conduct stakeholder interviews 
• Audit existing experiences / designs
• Ingest existing UX documentation, supplementing where needed
• Conduct research with users to identify experience opportunities
• Conduct secondary research; analyze competitive or reference experiences

Describe current and possible experiences using common UX artifacts: personas, journey maps, flow diagrams, site/application maps, etc.

• Synthesize research findings into actionable insights
• Explore experience possibilities with moodboards, low-to-mid fidelity sketches, and simple design prototypes

Design

The Senior Product Designer 2 role’s core responsibilities are designing useful, usable, and desirable solutions to client challenges and systematically delivering high-quality assets that support VGV projects.

Expect to:

• Explore design concepts; develop beautiful, smart, executable, and extensible design ideas that achieve user and business goals
• Communicate design intent to teams and clients
• Run internal and client-facing reviews; effectively manage feedback
• Create core design assets, including: 
• Common UX diagrams (e.g., site/application maps)
• Low- to mid-fidelity visual representations of experiences (e.g., flow diagrams,  wireframes)
• High-fidelity visual representations of experiences (e.g., screen & component designs) 
• Design system & style documentation (e.g., typography, color palettes, components, interaction patterns)
• Simple interactive mockups
• Conduct research; evaluate potential experiences and validate solutions with potential users via prototypes and other appropriate methods.

Delivery

The Senior Product Designer 2 role is responsible for collaborating with developers to ensure the quality and scalability of the experiences we deliver.

Expect to:

• Collaborate with developers to identify important UI constraints at a project’s outset (e.g., frameworks used)
• Support developer needs during sprints
• Collaborate with developers to find viable design workarounds when the team encounters development challenges
• Work with developers and the QA team to ensure design intent is fully realized in the delivered experience.
• Deliver well-crafted design documentation that makes it easy for a future team to edit and extend the experience (e.g., clean files, clearly and consistently named layers and components, annotations provided where needed)
• Collaborate with clients to make sure they know how to work with and build upon the designs you’ve created.

Project Operations & Leadership

The Senior Product Designer 2 role drives the design aspects of client engagements and is responsible for collaborating with the program and product management teams to help plan and manage design work.

Expect to:

• Lead design discussions and reviews with clients.
• Collaborate with design leadership to push designs and establish the best ways to communicate with clients.
• Collaborate with program management to identify design activities, tasks and time required to accomplish project goals
• Work with clients and VGV product managers to help define and refine design-specific requirements
• Contribute to requirements definition, especially where they affect design
• Participate in all relevant project ceremonies (e.g., stand-ups, sprint planning, retrospectives) and clearly communicate the status of your work.
• Support business development opportunities as they arise on your program.
• Mentor more junior designers to help them develop their craft

Qualifications:

Experience

• 5+ years of UX/UI digital product design experience in either an agency or in-house setting
• Experience shipping digital products, especially mobile and web applications
• Experience working on multi-platform experiences (e.g., mobile, tablet, desktop, embedded) preferred

Portfolio

• A strong portfolio of work showcasing excellence in interaction design, visual design, and problem solving; clearly demonstrating individual contributions to shipped products, impact on users and business objectives, and your personal design sensibilities.

Core Skills

• UX Design: Expert in innovating and leveraging human-centered interaction design and information architecture best practices to deliver useful, usable and desirable experiences. Fluent in translating stakeholder goals, user research, and complex user flows into simple UIs. 
• Visual Design: Expert in the careful, systematic use of gestalt principles, color, typography, imagery and iconography to communicate clearly and set the emotional tone of an experience. Facility with implementation constraints and accessibility requirements. Proficient at creating, and making cases for, divergent visual design directions. Animation/motion design skills, a plus.
• Systems Design: Expert in documenting interaction details, visual design specifications, and QA of the implemented product. Proficient in defining standards for managing design at scale, using reusable components and patterns, and considering the end users of a design system, along with client and user context, ensuring usability, maintainability, and adoption. 
• Research: Proficient at collaborating with UX researchers to gather qualitative and quantitative evidence to support design decisions. Understands how research data measures success of the work and informs design decisions. Experience with design thinking activities and workshop facilitation is a plus.
• Product Strategy: Proficient in shaping a point of view based on research and product inputs. Proficient at using product strategy insights to inform decisions and ensure product success. Familiar with various UX success metrics and how to support them in designs. 
• Creative Leadership: Proficient at setting and defending the design vision, communicating the rationale behind design decisions, and influencing clients. Able to showcase work in a compelling, clear, and concise way, and prepare and present a narrative that considers the audience and business objectives. Fluent in handling complex client feedback and requirements, iterating on concepts accordingly.

Tools

• Mastery in Figma, our core design tool; including prototyping features
• Experience with higher-fidelity prototyping tools such as ProtoPie or Framer is preferred.
• Expertise with presentation tools such as Google Slides or Powerpoint is preferred.

Tech Literacy

• General tech literacy; strong understanding of front-end development concepts; familiarity with variations in screens sizes, OSes, and device capabilities
• Able to collaborate with engineers and clearly communicate design intent in ways they can understand
• High-level experience building interfaces in Flutter or other front end frameworks (e.g., React) is a plus.

Communication

• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills; a proven ability to present your work, defend your decisions and clarify feedback
• Outstanding ability to communicate ideas to designers, engineers, product managers, and leadership through storytelling, visuals, and presentations.

Collaboration

• Able to work independently and in a team environment.
• Able to participate in the team's communications channels and ceremonies. 
• Expert in collaborating with product owners, project managers and other decision making stakeholders
• Expert in synthesizing feedback into actionable to-dos and providing clear, actionable, and productive feedback.
• Able to successfully delegate work to junior team members when needed and and impact the quality of their outputs via feedback

Cognitive Traits

• Passionate about designing great software experiences
• Curiosity and being a quick study; able to rapidly ingest new information from a client, synthesize it for others, and turn it into design ideas
• Detail orientation
• Systems thinking bias; a deep impulse to bring order to systems and elegant structures and reuse of elements of a design. Able to incorporate user, business, and engineering perspectives into design decisions, easily identify dependencies, and consider costs and benefits on an issue-by-issue basis

Working Style

• Located in ET or CT time zones (or able to consistently work on that schedule)
• Flexible and comfortable with ambiguity and change during a project.
• Comfort and experience with handling several complex projects simultaneously.