Director, Product Design - Global Utilities, Systems & Devices

From our best-in-class products and our award-winning employee experience, to our elegant customer journey and the systems that power our teams: Design is in our DNA at Sprout Social. 

We’ve built a Product Design program centered on the pursuit of growing leaders. Supported and challenged by a diverse and connected design community, and armed with an expansive human-centered toolkit, our talented creative problem solvers demonstrate the true power of design to drive business impact, and lead their teams to see social differently. 

We’re looking for a passionate and visionary Director of Product Design to lead Sprout’s Global Systems, Utilities, and Devices teams, where cross-disciplinary squads focus on crafting the tools that enable our teams to deliver consistent, inclusive and quality customer experiences across all of our web and mobile products, as our business scales. 

What you’ll do

Leaders at Sprout champion our products, customers, team, processes and culture. They model our values, serve their people, and connect across the organization to level up our thinking, align priorities, and facilitate product innovation.

In this role, you’ll drive design strategy for our most foundational product areas by: 

• Inspiring and activating contributors across disciplines to deliver elegant systems, tools, libraries, and utilities that create measurable value for our customers and foster rapid innovation for internal Sprout teams. 
• Maturing our organizational understanding of product inclusivity; educating company-wide on how to build and maintain accessible product experiences
• Imagining a market-differentiating future for our native mobile applications and helping us chart a course to get there
• Developing a deep understanding of the people we design for, and enabling informed decision making across your teams.
• Optimizing the skills and processes that facilitate quality craft at every stage of work. 
• Fostering strong partnership with Engineering, Product, Sales, and Marketing leaders, working together to identify opportunities, align with stakeholders and rally teams toward a strategic vision.

You’ll also model and coach strong, thoughtful people leadership across the organization by:

• Hiring, coaching and developing talent. 
• Creating an environment where your people have both structure and autonomy, inspiration and connection– where managers, generalists, and specialists all find purpose and satisfaction in their work, and personal growth through self-awareness and strategic challenge. 
• Fostering a healthy culture among your direct reports and cross-disciplinary squads, driving product org-community initiatives and influencing our product building process and operations.
• Demonstrating vulnerability and transparency; leading with love, empathy, wisdom and kindness; creating safe space for play, focus, and deep thought, where feedback is given and taken generously.
• Adding your voice to maturing our product design practice in partnership with your design leadership peers. Nurturing and inspiring our entire creative team as we continue to evolve all the ways that we work, connect, investigate, and story-tell. 

What we’ll do

As you invest your time growing others, our team will invest their time growing you. Through hands-on coaching and learning opportunities, we’ll:

• Expand the breadth and depth of your leadership experience, and your exposure to new challenges, ideas and perspectives. 
• Continue to sharpen your methods and skills, further hone your management style, level-up your strategic business acumen, and shape a unique career path to fit your evolving strengths and passions. 
• Encourage you to leverage our flexible vacation time and work from anywhere approach by designing your own days, weeks, and working styles, and your own systems for work, rest, recovery, and reflection– so that you can grow in and out of work and model healthy, balanced productivity for our team.
• Ensure that our investment in you is material and accruing through our stock options plan, so that you own your own piece of our publicly traded company.
• Facilitate your involvement in communities in and outside of Sprout, with opportunities to add your voice and talent to our Community Resource Groups, and ways to live out our company values in the public and civic spaces that matter most to you.
• Provide avenues for you to learn from and teach others– laterally, and up and down, collaborating with executive stakeholders and developing alongside other senior leaders across disciplines and departments. 

We’re eager to hear how you set the bar high for your teams. We’re excited to brainstorm with you on how Sprout can continue to lead in the market. We’re looking forward to hearing which customer problems you obsess over, the clever ways that you’ve learned to break-down complex concepts for others, and what aspect of craft quality you can’t wait to help us level-up. We’re eager to experience your favorite cultural connection activities and workshop structures. We can’t wait to get your perspective on our craft principles and designing systems that scale. We can’t wait to hear your story, to tell you our own, and to shape each others’ as we continue to grow! 

What You'll need

These are the minimum qualifications that our hiring team is looking for in this role:

• Seasoned design and/or product leader with extensive experience managing people and expertise in the Saas or B2B software space
• Evidence of strong collaborative partnerships across product, engineering, and broader departmental leaders, including executive stakeholders
• Proven track record of setting teams up to successfully deliver against customer needs and business goals

Additionally, these are the preferred qualifications that would indicate a particularly strong candidate:

• Experience managing managers
• Familiarity with implementing, evolving and evangelizing design systems
• Seasoned storytelling, organizational education, and stakeholder management abilities
• Examples of how you’ve applied a customer-driven mindset to create and advocate for a strong point of view on product strategy, and coach your teams to apply rigorous human-centered methodologies to turn out simple and elegant product experiences

We’ve built a thoughtful and strong design culture, and we’re looking forward to you adding your own influence to all that we do.

Within 1 month, you will...

• Experience Sprout’s in-depth onboarding, covering everything from our company values to executive vision to in depth product training
• Partner with the Design Leadership team to define success for your role and your team
• Spend 1:1s with your direct reports to understand their goals, strengths, and opportunities so that you can help with their career progression
• Build relationships across Sprout so that you understand the business and the partners you’ll need to help your team make progress
• Learn how Sprout has done things to date, and think about how we make our team and processes even better going forward!

Within 3 month, you will...

• Attend leadership rituals across the wide range of teams you’ll be interacting with
• Get up to speed on the ongoing work of your teams, as well as what’s on the horizon and could benefit from your strategic partnership
• Influence a strong culture of design critique and collaboration, offering your thought leadership to ensure our designers and our work are held to a high-quality standard
• Ask the right questions and begin to understand the complexities your designers and design leaders are facing, offering early guidance on things you might be able to try together to push toward even better outcomes
• Weigh in on hiring and organizational planning, helping align design skill sets to business needs.

Within 6 month, you will...

• Develop a career plan alongside each of your direct reports and continue conversations with your manager on your own growth path as a leader
• Mature and strengthen your influence on our design and product strategy as you learn more about our customers and industry.
• Rally your team to deliver on key opportunities and advocate to make space to not only ship, but to learn
• Introduce new rituals and processes to improve the delivery of our designs.

Within 12 month, you will...

• Lead the performance review and career band calibration process for your team
• Become an integral voice in driving future strategy for Sprout’s Engagement features and products
• Inspire your team with new ways of thinking and working and dream with design leadership on our long term vision
• Keep defining what design leadership means at Sprout. We can’t wait to hear your own unique ideas of how you’ll make our work and our company even better

Note: When applying, please include a link to samples of your work. This could be a portfolio website, a zip file of artifacts, or a case study of a specific project that showcases your people leadership skills.

About Sprout Social
Sprout Social powers open communication between individuals, brands and communities through elegant, sophisticated software. We are relentless about solving hard problems for our customers and committed to both customer and team success. Our team’s shared belief in Sprout’s mission promotes a culture of openness, empowerment and fun. 

We’re proud to regularly be recognized for our team, product and culture. Our benefits program includes:

• Insurance and benefit options that are built for both individuals and families
• Progressive policies to support work/life balance, like our flexible paid time off and parental leave program 
• High-quality and well-maintained equipment—your computer will never prevent you from doing your best
• Wellness initiatives to ensure both health and mental well-being of our team
• Ongoing education and development opportunities via our Grow@Sprout program, employee-led diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and mentorship programs for aspiring leaders
• Growing corporate social responsibility program that is driven by the involvement and passion of our team members
• Beautiful, convenient and state-of-the-art offices in Chicago’s Loop and downtown Seattle, for those who prefer an office setting

Whenever possible, Sprout wants to provide our team with the flexibility to work in the location that makes the most sense for them. For those that prefer an office setting, this role may be based in our Chicago or Seattle locations. If you prefer to work from your home, we can accommodate that for many locations across the United States. We are not set up in all states, however, so please take a look at the drop down box in our application to see whether your state is listed.

Sprout Social is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and an Affirmative Action Employer. We do not discriminate based on identity- race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry, sex (including sexual identity), age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, veteran or military status, unfavorable discharge from military service, genetic information, sexual orientation, marital status, order of protection status, citizenship status, arrest record or expunged or sealed convictions, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law. Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in our 2021 DEI Report.

If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please contact us by email at [email protected] and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. We'll do all we can to ensure you're set up for success during our interview process while upholding your privacy, including requests for accommodation. Please note that only inquiries concerning a request for reasonable accommodation will be responded to from this email address.

For more information about our commitment to equal employment opportunity, please click here (1) Equal Opportunity Employment Poster  (2) Sprout Social's Affirmative Action Statement (3) Pay Transparency Statement.

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