Product Designer job description

Product design — Product Designer
Owns end-to-end design for a feature with little oversight.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Research
- User Research Planning — You can plan a single-method study, such as a set of interviews, for a well-defined question, with a mentor checking your plan.
- Qualitative User Interviewing — You can run a scripted interview on your own, keep it on time, and probe an unexpected answer instead of moving straight to the next question.
- Usability Testing — You can design the test tasks and success criteria yourself, run unmoderated testing at scale, and separate a genuine usability problem from one participant's preference.
- Research Synthesis and Insight Reporting — You can turn a set of session notes into themes and a short write-up the team can read. You separate what a participant actually did from what you inferred about why.
- Competitive and Comparative Analysis — You can run a comparison across a given set of products for a given problem and write up the patterns you find. You describe how each one behaves rather than which one you like.

Structure & Flow
- Information Architecture — You can build a sitemap or navigation structure for a defined section, and run a simple card sort to check your grouping.
- Interaction and Flow Design — You can design a complex flow with branching logic and edge cases on your own, and you catch the edge cases a specification missed.
- User Journey Mapping — You can build a journey map for one flow from research notes, showing the touchpoints and the moments where users get stuck. You update the map when new sessions contradict it.
- Wireframing — You can wireframe a complex screen with many states and conditions, and use wireframes to explore several layout options quickly before committing.
- Interactive Prototyping — You can build a prototype with conditional logic and data that behaves convincingly enough to fool a first-time tester.

Visual & UI Design
- Visual Design — You can design visually for a whole feature with consistent hierarchy and tone, and give visual feedback that improves someone else's work.
- User Interface Design — You can design new UI patterns when the system has no component that fits, and specify their states precisely enough that engineering does not have to guess.
- Design Systems and Component Libraries — You can propose and design a new component to a defined pattern, documenting its states and variants for the system.
- Responsive and Adaptive Layout — You can design a layout that holds up across screen sizes, orientations and input methods without drawing a separate mobile version. You decide what reflows, what collapses and what is dropped on a small screen.

Accessibility
- Accessible Interface Design — You can design a screen that meets the required accessibility standard from the start, including focus order and touch target size, without being told to.
- Inclusive Design Practice — You can design for needs beyond the default user, such as low vision, a slow connection or a second language, when those needs are known. You raise them before sign-off rather than after build.
- Assistive Technology Evaluation — You can test a flow with a screen reader and the keyboard and write the failures up clearly enough for a developer to reproduce them without asking you what you did.

Content & Handover
- UX Writing and Content Design — You can write the copy for a full screen or short flow, including its error and empty states, in the product's established voice.
- Content Style and Voice Consistency — You can keep the copy in a feature consistent in tone and terminology. You check how a word is already used elsewhere in the product before introducing a new one.
- Design Critique Facilitation — You can take part in a critique and give feedback on a specific part of a design rather than a general reaction. You ask what problem the designer was solving before offering an opinion.
- Design Rationale and Storytelling — You can present a design to your team, walk through the options you considered and say why you dropped them. You answer straightforward challenges without abandoning the decision on the spot.
- Engineering Handover and Specification — You can spec a whole feature so engineering builds it without guessing, covering loading, error, empty, overflow and permission variants. You agree what lives in code and what lives in the design file before handover starts.
- Design QA During Build — You can run design QA for a feature on your own before release, including responsive behaviour and interaction states, and decide which drift blocks the release and which is logged for later.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can break a small piece of work into tasks, sequence them, and run it to a date you agreed, escalating risks before they become slips.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate your own tasks with reasonable accuracy and deliver at a steady enough pace that other people can plan around you.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can pick up a problem that has no obvious owner and make yourself the accountable party for it, including the parts nobody enjoys.
- Quality Focus — You can define what good enough means for a project, put the checks in place to prove it, and hold back a release that misses the bar.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can break a large, ambiguous problem into tractable pieces, weigh the options against evidence, and explain the tradeoff you chose.
- Domain Expertise — You can work confidently across the systems and tools your team uses daily, and you can explain how your work serves the team's goals.
- Continuous Learning — You can pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it, and you turn what you learned into something others can reuse.

Communication
- Communication — You can explain a complex topic to people with very different backgrounds, adjusting the detail to the audience without talking down to them.
- Collaboration — You can build working relationships beyond your own team and get things done through people who do not report to you.
- Technical Writing — You can write for a defined audience, whether a proposal, a runbook, or a decision record, and make the reasoning as clear as the conclusion.
- Stakeholder Management — You can identify who is affected by your work and keep them updated at a level of detail and a cadence that suits them.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can identify a problem and propose a way forward unprompted, and you take a small leading role such as running a working group.
- Mentoring — You can onboard someone onto your team's work, answer their questions patiently, and give feedback specific enough to act on.
- Strategic Thinking — You can connect your team's work to its goals and question a task that does not appear to serve them.