Senior Product Designer job description

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

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Train other researchers to interview well, and design interview guides that a less experienced researcher can run without your presence.
- Design the information architecture across a product spanning several teams.
- Write a study plan and screener that recruit disabled participants, and defend the method and sample size you chose.
- Decide when usability testing is the right method against the risk being tested, and turn results into specific design changes the team actually makes.
- Run the synthesis for a whole study on your own and produce personas or insights the team acts on.
- Choose which competing and adjacent products are worth studying for a design question and turn the comparison into a recommendation.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Product Designer level (level 2 of 5) or equivalent
- Holds Nielsen Norman Group UX Certification

REQUIRED SKILLS
Research
- User Research Planning — You can write a study plan and screener that recruit disabled participants, and defend the method and sample size you chose.
- 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 each look reasonable alone.
- User Journey Mapping — You can map an end-to-end journey across channels on your own, including the user's emotions 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 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 define the visual language for a product, and resolve a conflict between brand expression and clarity in someone else's favor or your own.
- User Interface Design — You can design UI across a whole product with consistent density, spacing and behavior, 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 one layout that works across screen sizes and input methods, including at 400% zoom.

Accessibility
- Accessible Interface Design — You can design flows for needs a checklist misses, such as motion sensitivity and cognitive load.
- Inclusive Design Practice — You can build inclusion into a design from the first sketch, with lightweight pages and imagery, and name who it still excludes and what would include them.
- Assistive Technology Evaluation — You can run an assistive technology check across a whole feature, and retest each fix instead of trusting the ticket.

Content & Handover
- UX Writing and Content Design — You can write a complex flow with many states, and edit copy on neighboring screens so voice and terms stay consistent.
- 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 before release and decide which drift blocks it.

Design Leadership
- Design Strategy — You can write a design strategy for a product area that links its work to company goals.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can coordinate a small team's work on a shared goal: who does what by when, what has to wait for what, and a revised plan when things change.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into stages, and defend the estimate when it is challenged.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, taking the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can set how quality is checked on complex work shared by several teams, and you spot the problems that only appear where their pieces meet.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can make the call on a problem outside your expertise and explain its cost, time and risk.
- Domain Expertise — You can advise the team on your area and apply new developments in the field where they pay 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 agreement on the facts and the next steps, and help colleagues frame 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.
- Writing & Documentation — You can own the documents behind a large piece of work, coordinating contributions so that people who were not involved can carry it on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and turn down a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead one piece of work shared by several people, on your own team and beyond, and make calls that they act on.
- 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)