Lead Product Designer job description

Product design — Lead Product Designer
Sets design direction across a team and unblocks its work.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Research
- User Research Planning — You can plan research across a multi-method study spanning several teams, and you push back when a stakeholder question cannot actually be answered by research.
- Qualitative User Interviewing — You can train other researchers to interview well, and design interview guides that a less experienced researcher can run without your presence.
- Usability Testing — You can decide when usability testing is the right method against the risk being tested, and turn results into specific design changes the team actually makes.
- Research Synthesis and Insight Reporting — You can synthesise messy findings from several studies and sources into insights that settle a contested design question. You say plainly when the data does not support the conclusion people want.
- Competitive and Comparative Analysis — You can choose which competing and adjacent products are worth studying for a design question and turn the comparison into a recommendation. You say which patterns to borrow, which to avoid, and why.

Structure & Flow
- Information Architecture — You can design the information architecture across a product spanning several teams, and you catch structural decisions made elsewhere that will not scale.
- Interaction and Flow Design — You can design interaction patterns that other designers reuse, and resolve a conflict between two flows that both feel individually reasonable.
- User Journey Mapping — You can map journeys that cross teams and systems nobody owns end to end, and use the map to get those teams to agree what gets fixed first. You leave out the detail that will not change a decision.
- Wireframing — You can set the wireframing conventions your team uses, and know when to skip wireframing altogether because it would not save any real time.
- Interactive Prototyping — You can decide what fidelity of prototype a decision actually needs, and build one that persuades a sceptical stakeholder or engineer.

Visual & UI Design
- Visual Design — You can define the visual language for a product, and resolve a conflict between brand expression and clarity in someone else's favour or your own.
- User Interface Design — You can design UI across a whole product with consistent density, spacing and behaviour, and set the fidelity bar your team designs to.
- Design Systems and Component Libraries — You can set the governance for what enters the system and what gets deprecated, and resolve a conflict between two teams who want the same component to behave differently.
- Responsive and Adaptive Layout — You can solve layouts with hard constraints, such as dense tables, split views or content whose length varies wildly, and keep them usable on every device. You set the grid and breakpoint conventions your team works to.

Accessibility
- Accessible Interface Design — You can set the accessibility bar for a product and the review that enforces it, and coach other designers whose designs keep failing the same checks.
- Inclusive Design Practice — You can handle designs where inclusion pulls against a commercial or technical constraint and find an option that holds both. You teach other designers to spot exclusion in their own work rather than fixing it for them.
- Assistive Technology Evaluation — You can plan and run an assistive technology check across a whole feature with more than one screen reader, and tell a genuine barrier from a preference. You retest after the fix instead of trusting the ticket.

Content & Handover
- UX Writing and Content Design — You can set the tone and terminology guidelines your team writes to, and resolve a disagreement between two reasonable ways of phrasing something.
- Content Style and Voice Consistency — You can write and edit the copy for a whole product surface on your own, holding voice and terminology steady, and you correct the inconsistencies you find on neighbouring screens as you go.
- Design Critique Facilitation — You can run a critique on contentious work with senior stakeholders present and keep the feedback about the design rather than the person. You coach other designers to take critique without defending.
- Design Rationale and Storytelling — You can make the case for a design that is expensive or unpopular to senior stakeholders and get a decision. You frame the same choice differently for engineers, sales and executives without changing what it is.
- Engineering Handover and Specification — You can hand over designs that span several teams or an unfamiliar platform, and work out with engineers what genuinely needs specifying instead of documenting everything. You catch the edge case that would otherwise surface in production.
- Design QA During Build — You can QA a complex release where the build departs from the design for sound technical reasons, and negotiate what actually gets changed. You review during the build so drift is caught before it is expensive.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run work spanning several teams, negotiate scope and sequencing with their owners, and maintain one shared plan that all of them actually use.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate work spanning several teams, name the assumptions each figure rests on, and re-cut the plan as those assumptions break.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, absorbing the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can design the quality practice for complex work owned by several teams, and you anticipate the failure modes that only appear once systems interact.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in domains where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, performance, and maintainability at once.
- Domain Expertise — You can bring in practice from outside the organisation and make it work here, and your judgement demonstrably improves the projects you touch.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Technical Writing — You can own the documentation of a large project, coordinating contributions so the work can be maintained by people who never built it.
- Stakeholder Management — You can hold senior and external relationships, negotiate between competing demands, and deliver unwelcome news without losing trust.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead across team boundaries, build the credibility that makes people follow you by choice, and create room for others to lead.
- Mentoring — You can develop other mentors, coach people through career decisions rather than tasks, and lift the capability of a whole team.
- Strategic Thinking — You can set direction for an area, choose deliberately what not to do, and defend that choice when it is challenged.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- Nielsen Norman Group UX Certification (required from Senior Product Designer)
- IAAP Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) (required from Lead Product Designer)
- IAAP Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) (required from Lead Product Designer)