Lead Product Designer

Purpose of the role

Lead designers start to play a more strategic role; working ahead of the team(s) and alongside PdMs to explore and shape future opportunities, guide the groups research and design efforts and drive practice improvement.

About the role

This role recognises the growing need to provide a more holistic and coordinated effort over a range of research and design activities; better serving both the current and future needs of our product portfolio.

It also acknowledges the varying scope and complexity of research and design work, the need to support and sustain the growth of more junior members of the team and our desire to scale Design Leadership.

Skills

Leadership

  • Takes a strong lead on more complex, cross-product design efforts or wider programmes of practice improvement; with a track record of leading others towards successful outcomes.
  • Plays a key role in recruitment and our design community, helping to attract and hire new design talent; whilst contributing to the efforts to build the brand of design (writing/speaking) at Redgate.

Mentorship

  • Leads and mentors others in the practice of designing interface controls, interaction patterns, paradigms and workflows; improving their ability to prototype ideas and solve new, complex interaction problems.
  • Leads and mentors others in the practice of planning, running and analysing the feedback from evaluative research sessions; improving their ability to test/validate new ideas or optimise a given solution. Plays a key role in developing others and accelerating the growth of designers in the division; providing formalised mentoring and coaching, as well as seeking opportunities to share their skills and educate more widely.

Role-Specific

  • Demonstrates best practice and depth of skill with prioritising, planning and coordinating research and design efforts across larger, more complex product initiatives; with some success operating across an entire product area or problem space.
  • Demonstrates best practice and depth of skill with prioritising, planning and coordinating efforts across larger, more complex operational areas or programmes of practice improvement.
  • Demonstrates best practice and depth of skill with applying principles of good UI/visual design (layout, colour, hierarchy, type) to create visually compelling and consistent product interfaces.
  • Demonstrates best practice and depth of skill in the practice of planning, conducting and analysing strategic research activities, necessary to discover, understand and define customers, their Jobs (JTBD), pains, gains and journeys.
  • Demonstrates best practice and depth of skill in utilising a Lean/hypothesis-driven approach to research and design. Using an experimental methodology to identify minimum viable solutions to customer's problems; iteratively validating assumptions and learning through fast, frequent feedback loops.
  • Demonstrates best practice and depth of skill in applying insight (qual & quant), analysis and creativity to define, shape and explore new opportunities; both informing and aligning with strategy and contributing to a wider product or solution road map.

Communication

  • Routinely presents learning, progress and results of broader research and design efforts to the team, division and senior stakeholders; actively encourages and supports other, more junior designers to share and seek regular feedback.

Emotional Intelligence

  • Displays empathy towards colleagues, and users of our products.
  • Able to approach challenges in an optimistic and pragmatic way.
  • Able to commit to decisions even if disagreed with.

Delivery

  • Contributes to the ongoing development of design practices at Redgate, as well as the education and advocacy required to integrate an approach for research and design across a number of products.
  • Contributes to defining principles, best practice and systems that govern our design standards; working to raise the bar on quality and consistency across a number of Redgate's products.

Business Knowledge

  • Operates as a peer alongside Project Management (other senior stakeholders) to help inform and shape vision and strategy; ensuring research is well aligned, insights are regularly communicated and design effort serves our strategic objectives.