Senior Product Designer job description

Product design — Senior Product Designer
Leads design for a product area and raises design quality.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Research
- User Research Planning — You can choose the right method for a given question on your own, write the study plan and screener, and defend the sample size you picked.
- 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 run the synthesis for a whole study on your own and produce personas or insights the team acts on. You show the evidence behind every theme so anyone can trace it back to a session.
- 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 an end-to-end journey across channels on your own, including how the user feels and where they drop out, and run the session that validates it with the people who own each touchpoint.
- 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 audit the system for inconsistency and drift, and lead a component's design from proposal through documentation to adoption.
- 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 for accessibility needs a checklist does not cover, such as motion sensitivity and cognitive load, and justify the trade-offs you made.
- Inclusive Design Practice — You can build inclusion into a design from the first sketch, choosing defaults, wording and interactions that work across a wide range of ability and context. You can name who a design still excludes and what it would take to include 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 write for a complex flow with many states and edge cases, and rewrite a colleague's draft so it reads more like the product's voice without losing meaning.
- 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 a small piece of work, hold the group to the question the designer asked, and record what was decided so the session leaves a trace.
- Design Rationale and Storytelling — You can tell the story of a design end to end to a mixed audience, joining the user problem, the evidence and the trade-offs. You defend a decision under pressure, and change it when the challenge is a fair one.
- 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 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 run a multi-person project end to end: you set the scope, track the dependencies between the people involved, and re-plan when reality moves.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into milestones, and hold the estimate up under challenge.
- 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 be the person the team consults on your area, and you follow where the field is moving and apply it where it pays off.
- 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 win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and refuse a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can take charge of work with no clear owner, motivate people who do not report to you, and make calls others are willing to follow.
- Mentoring — You can mentor someone over months, tell them the uncomfortable thing they need to hear, and adapt how you teach to how they learn.
- Strategic Thinking — You can look a year ahead in your area, name what will matter by then, and turn that into work people can pick up now.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- Nielsen Norman Group UX Certification (required from Senior Product Designer)