Director, Product Design

At Smartsheet, our purpose is to empower everyone to achieve more. As a member of the Experience Design team, you'll have the opportunity to shape the future of work, making our category-leading work execution platform valuable, intuitive, elegant, and engaging. 

As the Director of Product Design, you will lead and grow a diverse and talented team of Product Designers in applying principles of design thinking to conceptualize engaging and personalized user experiences for our web and mobile apps. You have a solid history of making the people around you better. You drive quality and efficiency by establishing processes, developing talent, and leveraging your own expertise and experience to help coach your team to accomplish more than they might have without you. You see yourself as a team captain more than a coach. 

You are skilled at scaling your influence and abilities. You love to collaborate with designers, user researchers, engineers, product managers, executives, and inspire them to do their best. You thrive on working well with others… and getting things done. You will represent the end user and evangelize human-centered methodologies across the product team to ensure innovative designs that truly meet people’s needs from first-time users to seasoned experts. 

You will report to our VP of Product Design located in our Bellevue, WA office, or you may work remotely from anywhere in the US where Smartsheet is a registered employer.

You Will:

• Help establish, drive and articulate a vision for the future of design at Smartsheet.
• Define the user experience strategy and vision for your areas of oversight.
• Establish goals and target metrics that design decisions can be mapped to.
• Manage the day-to-day and strategic activities of UX designers, making sure that the human-centered process is properly planned and followed.
• Build, evolve and scale UX processes, standards, and tools.
• Mentor and coach UX designers in a motivating and supportive manner and keep the team on top of emerging UX techniques and tools.
• Develop career paths and programs tailored to individual team member professional development.
• Gain a deep understanding of user needs and goals and communicate them to cross functional product teams.
• Create alignment with other groups within the company by working collaboratively with product teams to launch new features and evolve existing ones based on an understanding of user needs, business objectives and technical constraints.
• Translate business goals into innovative, creative and engaging product experiences.
• Support other duties.

You Have:

• 12+ years of experience in a highly cross-functional role running strategic projects from idea through implementation.
• 6+ years leading & mentoring UX teams, manager of managers a plus.
• Successful experience leading a large team of designers (10+).
• Examples of broadly influential UX work that contributed directly to the achievement of business goals.
• Experience designing for enterprise SaaS platforms.
• Passion for the field of User Experience. Self motivated and enthusiastic; knows when it's necessary to seek out guidance.
• Experience facilitating activities to gather insights on user needs and goals and conducting usability testing.
• Experience finding simple, innovative solutions for complex problems.
• Experience with Agile methodologies.
• Strong visual design skills and sensibilities.
• Expert in Figma, Creative Cloud or other visual design, wireframing, and prototyping tools. Proficiency in rapid prototyping.
• Highly organized with planning, conducting, and tracking work.
• Excellent communication skills and interpersonal skills; ability to work successfully with teams across the organization, including Product Management and Engineering.
• Ability to articulate design decisions and advocate for the user.

Last updated on Aug 16, 2024