Principal Designer job description

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

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Set the research approach and ethics standard for a product line, including which questions research should answer and how participant data is handled.
- Set the interviewing standard for the organization, and coach other researchers through hard participant situations.
- Set how research insights are stored, shared and reused across the organization, so studies build on each other instead of repeating.
- Compare against adjacent industries when no direct competitor solves the problem, and still reach a usable answer.
- Set the architectural principles the organization's products are built on, and arbitrate when two teams' structures conflict.
- Set the interaction principles a whole product is built on, and decide a flow that teams cannot agree on.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Lead Product Designer level (level 4 of 5) or equivalent
- Holds IAAP Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC), IAAP Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) and Nielsen Norman Group UX Certification

REQUIRED SKILLS
Research
- User Research Planning — You can set the research approach and ethics standard for a product line, including which questions research should answer and how participant data is handled.
- Qualitative User Interviewing — You can set the interviewing standard for the organization, and coach other researchers through hard participant situations.
- 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 organization, 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 organization'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 decide a flow that teams cannot agree on.
- 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 skip wireframing when it would not save 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 for the organization, and make the final call when opinions genuinely differ.
- User Interface Design — You can set UI design standards for the organization, and resolve 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 organization, 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 organization, and judge which accessibility findings are genuine barriers rather than tool noise.
- Inclusive Design Practice — You can resolve conflicts between inclusion, environmental impact and a commercial or technical constraint, and teach designers to spot exclusion in their own work.
- Assistive Technology Evaluation — You can evaluate custom widgets and multi-step flows across platforms, and trace a surprising result back to its cause.

Content & Handover
- UX Writing and Content Design — You can set your team's tone and terminology guidelines, and settle conflicts where two teams use different terms for the same thing.
- Design Critique Facilitation — You can set how critique works across the design organization, 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 that design decisions rest on evidence and trade-offs, not seniority or taste, and 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.

Design Leadership
- Design Strategy — You can get design into early strategy and delivery decisions by working with senior leaders.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can set the everyday habits for how work is organized and followed up across the organization, and teams you do not lead adopt the routines you introduce.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast work and staffing quarters ahead, and set the estimating method other teams use.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can report the organization's most exposed outcomes to its leaders as they stand, including bad news, and answer for them.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organization by building the tools and habits that make the careful way the easy way.

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

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organization communicates by creating the forums and norms that teams use to share information.
- Collaboration — You can remove the barriers that stop teams working together by putting in place routines and forums they use across the organization.
- Writing & Documentation — You can set the writing standard the organization works to, and documents you wrote are still in use long after you have moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organization in its most important relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can set direction for the whole organization, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own.
- Mentoring — You can shape how the organization grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong in their field.
- Strategic Thinking — You can shape the organization'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)