Senior Product Design & Innovation Lead

Ascend Learning is a national leader in data driven, online educational solutions for learners, educators and employers in high-growth, licensure-driven professions spanning healthcare, fitness and wellness, skilled trades, insurance, and financial services. We are passionate about accelerating learning while impacting job readiness, employment success and employee retention with the belief that our work changes lives.

Our culture is intentionally results-driven and selfless with a relentless focus on our customers. We believe in trust, transparency, freedom, and responsibility with a commitment to meritocracy, inclusion, and diversity of thought. Continual investment in our over 1500 employees is also a core principle realized through ongoing professional development and providing opportunities to grow, develop and lead. Ascend Learning is headquartered in Burlington, MA with additional office locations and remote workers in cities across the U.S.

Our design team is excited to be exploring the ways that technologies such as generative AI and XR can be tapped to improve learning for our customers. As a result, we're looking for creative designers to join our team and collaborate to design products that deliver cutting edge learning experiences.

The Senior Product Design & Innovation Lead collaboratively leads multi-functional teams to work on ambiguous, high-priority initiatives to create new products for Ascend Learning across its brands. In this role, you'll bring expertise in design approaches including customer research, concept ideation and refinement, prototyping, and business modeling. Coaching and facilitation skills are needed to guide your team to develop valuable, differentiating products and services to drive Ascend's growth and long-term market relevance.

This position can work hybrid from one of our Ascend Learning office locations: Burlington, MA, Leawood, KS, Minneapolis, MN, Gilbert, AZ, or fully remote will also be considered.

Responsibilities

• Lead product design and innovation projects-coordinating a multi-disciplined team through an iterative user-centered design process to develop new products and services with strong indicators of product market fit.
• Lead and conduct inspiration and market/competitive analysis activities to fuel creative thinking for teams.
• Facilitate a variety of ideation and concept design activities from brainstorming, to creating scenarios and experience blueprints, to defining detailed product requirements.
• Facilitate and run prototyping activities from low-fidelity (e.g. paper prototyping), to high fidelity prototyping (e.g. looks-like, works-like) to evaluate product ideas and their underlying assumptions
• Facilitate, coach and/or lead teams in thinking creatively about business opportunities.
• Lead collaboration with Design and Product leadership to build our product design tools and training to build Ascend's product and business design capability.

Experience

• 7+ years of experience designing and bringing new products to market in a UX, product design, product management capacity, or similar.
• Experience leading multi-disciplinary teams, keeping teams on track, collaborative, and energized.
• Demonstrated experience bringing at least one product to market.

Required Skills

• High comfort with ambiguity-helping teams navigate through complex challenges with unknown outcomes.
• Combination of analytical and creative skills to conceive of new product concepts that are desirable, technically feasible, and viable as businesses.
• Strong patternmaking and synthesis skills to identify urgent customer needs and differentiating market opportunities.
• Experience creating design artifacts and deliverables such as workflows, personas, journey maps, wireframes, interactive design prototypes.
• Business savvy: comfortable aligning design projects with company strategies, facilitating competitive analysis.
• Passion for user experience design and the willingness to learn new processes and skills, and work to continuously improve the UX team's skills and knowledge through your work and experiences.
• Strong communication, collaboration, and facilitation skills.
• Demonstrates strong critical thinking skills.

Ascend Learning, LLC is proud to be an equal opportunity employer (M/F/Vets/Disabled). No agency or search firm submissions will be accepted. Applications for U.S. based positions with Ascend Learning, LLC must be legally authorized to work in the United States and verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.

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