Director, Product Design

Who’ll You Be Joining:  

The Product Design team is comprised of a group of system thinkers who have deep empathy for our customers. We ensure that each touchpoint of the customer journey is carefully crafted to provide a useful, usable, and delightful experience; this includes ensuring cohesion across marketing, industrial design and interfaces, voice prompts, mobile apps, and website experiences. We care about the people we work with. This means we trust each other, are generous with feedback, and prioritize data and research over individual opinions.

As the Director of Product Design, you are a team leader, design advocate, and mentor with a deep understanding of the industry and a strong design sensibility. You will be responsible for managing a group of talented product designers and leading the design process and strategy.

As a design leader, you will own the design strategy for all of ecobee’s products, spanning smart thermostats, smart security, and platform initiatives. You will utilize data-driven insights to experiment with innovative ideas and support the team in refining designs to achieve desired business outcomes. You will also collaborate with Product, Engineering, Industrial Design, and User Experience Research teams to create and optimize a sustainable user experience that attracts and retains long-term engaged users. You will act as a bridge between Design and the Business, consistently advocating for the customers and their experiences in cross-functional settings.

How You’ll Make an Impact:

• Lead and manage a passionate group of Product Designers. Create an environment that fosters creativity, builds trust and accountability, and keeps the team highly engaged and proud of their work.
• Own a visionary, long-term experience design strategy across ecobee’s products.
• Lead the design practice. Define and govern best practices for design critiques, team retrospectives, team learning initiatives, management reviews, strategic planning.
• Partner with engineering and product management to establish ecobee’s product strategy and roadmap.
• Rigorously create and participate in cross-functional rituals; ultimately elevating the design practice and pushing ecobee to reach a new level of product design maturity.
• Be the Design representative cross-functionally, and with leadership. Demonstrate poise, executive presence, business ownership, and strategic thinking.
• Shape a culture of innovation across the team through action, presence, and leadership while acting as the catalyst for these changes.

What You’ll Bring to the Table:

• You have a bachelor’s degree in design or equivalent degree or work experience.
• You have 5+ years of experience working as a product designer or a similar role.
• You have more than 5 years’ experience leading and growing successful design teams.
• You have proven experience fostering strong relationships with cross-functional agile teams. You can effectively guide designers to communicate and negotiate with other cross-functional members.
• You advocate using data and evidence in iterative decision making. You can support designers to partner with research to design and run experiments; take findings, iterate, and improve on designs through evaluative and generative research.
• You have proven yourself as a sophisticated and rigorous operator; establishing rituals, and processes that influence cross-functionally.
• You have excellent communication, presentation, interpersonal, and negotiation skills for a broad range of audiences including leadership.

Just so you know: The hired candidate will be required to complete a background check.

Career growth and development:

• Active career coaching through regular 1:1s with your manager and leadership
• A learning budget is provided and actively encouraged to develop new skills or sharpen existing ones.
• Career growth tracks are offered to ensure that practitioners are placed in positions to grow based on their skills, interests, and career aspirations
• Frequent learning and development sessions offered by the company as well as by the department to support career growth

What happens after you apply: 

Application review: It will happen by an actual person in Talent Acquisition. We get upwards of 100+ applications for some roles, it can take a few days, but every applicant can expect a note regarding their application status. 

Interview Process:

• Round 1: A 30-minute phone/video call with a member in Talent Acquisition
• Round 2: A 1 hour interview with the Hiring Manager
• Round 3: 1 hour interview with 3-4 members of the cross functional team - expect technical, behavioural, and situational questions - one of these will be a call with 2 members of the design team focusing on the UX strategy and problem solving - you will be asked to share one project (or more if you’re inclined to) from your portfolio that you believe best demonstrates your ability for the role
• Round 4: Case Study – For the final interview, you will be given ~1 week to complete, and then present a Case Study. The goal of this round is to see how you think, and what you’re like to collaborate with

•

Last updated on Apr 2, 2024