Principal Designer job description

Product design — Principal Designer
Shapes design strategy and the hardest calls org-wide.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Research
- User Research Planning — You can set the research approach for a product line, deciding which questions are worth answering by research at all and which are not.
- Qualitative User Interviewing — You can set the interviewing standard for the organisation, and are the person other researchers ask for help with hard participants.
- 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 set how research insights are stored, shared and reused across the organisation, so studies build on each other instead of repeating. You decide which insights are strong enough to move the roadmap.
- Competitive and Comparative Analysis — You can compare against adjacent industries when no direct competitor solves the problem, and still reach a usable answer. You stop the team copying a rival pattern that does not fit our users.

Structure & Flow
- Information Architecture — You can set the architectural principles the organisation's products are built on, and arbitrate when two teams' structures conflict.
- Interaction and Flow Design — You can set the interaction principles a whole product is built on, and are the person called in when a flow nobody can agree on needs a decision.
- 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 set the visual design standard and taste bar for the organisation, and are trusted to make the final call when opinions genuinely differ.
- User Interface Design — You can set UI design standards for the organisation, and are the person who resolves a UI dispute that has already gone through two rounds of debate.
- Design Systems and Component Libraries — You can set design system strategy across the organisation, including its relationship to code, tokens and multiple brands or products.
- 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 accessibility standards and procurement expectations across the organisation, and judge which accessibility findings are genuine barriers rather than tool noise.
- 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 evaluate custom widgets, live regions and multi-step flows where assistive technology behaves differently on each platform. You are who the team asks when a screen reader result makes no sense.

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 settle wording conflicts where two teams use different terms for the same thing, and get one term adopted. You add a rule to the style guide when the same question keeps coming back.
- Design Critique Facilitation — You can set how critique works across the design organisation, including how often it runs, who attends and what must go through it. You change critique habits in teams you do not manage by showing better sessions.
- Design Rationale and Storytelling — You can set the expectation across the organisation that design decisions are argued from evidence and trade-offs rather than seniority or taste. You are the person trusted to speak for design where investment is decided.
- 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 the organisation's largest and most contested programmes, and the planning practices you introduce get adopted by teams you do not lead.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast at the scale of quarters and headcount, and the estimation practice you set is what the wider organisation plans against.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can take on the outcomes the organisation is most exposed on, and other leaders route ownerless problems to you by default.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organisation by building the tooling and habits that make the careful path the easy one.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can crack problems the organisation has repeatedly failed to solve, and your approach becomes how others tackle that whole class of problem.
- Domain Expertise — You can influence how the field is practised beyond this organisation, and your expertise settles questions that have stood open for years.
- Continuous Learning — You can set what the organisation invests its learning time in, and the material and practice you create outlive your involvement.

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organisation communicates, and the forums and norms you create measurably improve how information travels through it.
- Collaboration — You can dismantle the barriers that stop teams working together, and how the organisation collaborates changes because of what you built.
- Technical Writing — You can set the writing standard the organisation works to, and documents you authored are still in use long after you moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organisation in its most consequential relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can set direction for the whole organisation, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own.
- Mentoring — You can shape how the organisation grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong practitioners.
- Strategic Thinking — You can shape the organisation's strategy, and the bets you argued for are visible in where it ended up.

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)