Product Design Group Lead

About the Job:

The Design Group Lead within the Technology department plays a critical role in driving impact across their group in service of the business. The Design Group Lead collaborates with Engineering and Product Group Lead partners on the long term vision, strategy and definition of problem spaces spanning across the group’s product-line experiences, resulting in meaningful impact on business objectives. They help drive both the creative vision and the design team. Their expertise often spans multiple domains or functions. They are versatile, and are able to apply their craft and problem solving skills to diverse problems.

In addition to the prioritization of a portfolio of work across a large team with their cross functional partners, they also manage, mentor, hire and build a world-class product design team and create annual and quarterly resource plans to maximize quality and coverage for the discipline within the group.

Responsibilities:

Leadership

Management, Mentoring, Influence

• Serves as a standard bearer for User Experience within the broader organization.
• Manages a team of Product Designers within their focus area. Responsible for career and performance management as well as day to day coaching and resource planning.
• Helps define hiring standards and practices as well as hiring and building the team as necessary
• Natural leader who can galvanize the team(s) around a shared vision, inspiring others to charge forward in support and realization of the team's "North Star".
• Provides mentorship to all levels of designers.
• Regularly provides training and support for new methods, tools, patterns

Craft skills

Depth and Growth of Design Skills

• Visionary who can translate undefined ideas into an actionable design framework / roadmap.
• Intuitive, with a strong ability to predict and anticipate user's unstated needs.
• Experienced storyteller who drives consensus and influences through thoughtful, compelling visual narratives.
• Generates adaptable and extensible UX frameworks, pushing other designers to think more flexibly.
• Considers the experience outside of the immediate product
• Creates specs, presentations, documents as needed to create clarity and alignment or help other designers execute.

Scope and Delivery

Scope of Project Work and Delivery

• Leads the creation of new product vision that can have a meaningful impact on business revenue.
• Can propose and prototype new product areas related to use cases from customers.
• Articulates strategy for emerging design/technology and its intersection with product and engineering.
• ​​Leads multiple systems/product design across multiple areas of focus.
• Innovation leader by example. Other leaders and executives in the company seek out your expertise.
• Critical feedback at the systems/strategic level in early design planning.
• Elevates predictive market trends, affecting strategic planning.
• Communicates design efforts to Senior leaders.
• Expected to anticipate emerging issues and ensure that they are handled
• Serves in senior consulting role on new products and future technologies, including market definition, business model, and core metrics targets at the company/product level
• May lead/influence significant non related groups or areas outside of the individual’s area of functional expertise

Process and Design Thinking

Judgment, Iteration, Facilitation, Independence

• Facilitates brainstorms, ideation sessions, design thinking workshops, design sprints, and other activities with partners within their product line, extended teams, and company leadership.
• Pushes boundaries of a solution; raises the bar for design work. Looks for improvements to "The way it's always been done".
• Anticipates needs for cross-product integrations and advocates for roadmap work to achieve them.

Collaboration and Communication

Communication, Collaboration, Feedback

• Peer to other company leaders; acts as a strategic thought-partner and conduit on behalf of the design team.
• Supports leaders and members of a team through design pairing and reviews.
• Serves as the main point of contact for a product or project across multiple disciplines.

Qualifications:

• 10+ years experience
• 1-2 years managing 1-3 people
• Very senior IC in recent history (staff designer, principal designer) - needs to be player coach, will still be hands on designing experiences
• Systems design experience
• Ability to construct longer term visions / blueprints
• Strong communicator
• Low ego
• Proven business impact
• Strong technical experience / background
• Enterprise B2B experience

Pay:

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones for Level M3:*

• Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or New York City Metropolitan Area: $200,000-235,000**
• Zone 2: Boston, DC, Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Seattle: $180,000 - $212,000**
• Zone 3: All other US locations: $170,000 - $200,000**

LaunchDarkly operates from a place of high trust and transparency; we are happy to state the pay range for our open roles to best align with your needs. Exact compensation may vary based on skills, experience, and location.

*Within the United States, our geographic pay zones are defined by counties surrounding major metropolitan areas.

**Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health benefits in addition to salary.

About LaunchDarkly:

Modern software delivery was supposed to be the foundation for a thriving digital business but reality has proven otherwise. Slow, inefficient development cycles, costly outages, and fragmented customer experiences are preventing developers from building their best software. The LaunchDarkly platform helps developers innovate on new features faster while protecting them with a safety valve to instantly rewind when things go wrong. Developers can target product experiences to any customer segment and maximize the business impact of every feature. And by gradually rolling out new application components, they escape nightmare "big-bang" technology migrations.

The LaunchDarkly platform was built to guide engineers to the next frontier of DevOps by:

• Improving the velocity and stability of software releases, without the fear of end customer outages
• Delivering targeted experiences by easily personalizing features to customer cohorts
• Maximizing the business impact of every feature through the ability to experiment and optimize
• Coordinating the release and optimization of software to provide consistent experiences across mobile platforms and device types
• Improving the effectiveness and productivity of engineering teams, by providing insights into engineering cadence and stability

At LaunchDarkly, we believe in the power of teams. We're building a team that is humble, open, collaborative, respectful and kind. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

One of our company values is 'Widen the Circle'. Which means we seek out diversity of perspectives to get better results. We understand everyone has their own unique talents and experiences. We encourage you to apply to this role even if you don’t think you meet 100% of the qualifications outlined above. We can find out together if it's the right match for your skillset.

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