Director of Product Design

Job Description

Whereabouts: Within CET +/- 9 hours and have some restrictions on hiring engineering

Interviews: Around 4 hours over a few weeks, including some practical work

Salary: Starting at £90,000 | $150,000 for USA-based candidates

*Note: We have no “caps” on our salary, and you can read our full compensation philosophy here. If our advertised salary doesn’t suit your current expectations, just let us know and we’re very open to discussing further.

Reporting to: Dave Thomson, VP Product

Ask us anything: careers@whereby.com 

“Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.” – designer Joe Sparano

Please note: If you are not seeing this role advertised on https://jobs.lever.co/whereby the role is likely closed for new applications. Unfortunately, we are not always in control of where our roles are posted as many websites post our roles without our express consent. For this reason, you may be reading out of date information - we are so sorry about that. Our careers team is always on hand to answer questions, drop us a line at careers@whereby.com

Your mission at Whereby*

To build a design function that is unified under one common set of objectives, and aligned with our product roadmap, vision and culture.

*This is the mission that moves you and your team through our strategic roadmap, and should be your focus for up to a year or two.

What is Whereby all about

Freedom to work from anywhere: our mission with Whereby is to give people freedom to live and work where they thrive.

📍 Our global HQ is in Oslo, Norway, but our users (and team) are worldwide - having been used in nearly every country in the world by millions of folk. 🌏

By making it possible to collaborate as well over video as you can in real life, we want to give you the choice to work from where your life happens. To allow you to be in a place where you can think and focus, but also allow a seamless and instant connection with others when you need to.

For our 80 team members, and also for our customers, we know that the ability to decouple location from work can be life-changing. They can afford the house they want, can spend less time commuting, be closer to nature, and their children get to grow up seeing their grandparents every day. Everyone on our team enjoys the enormous benefits that a flexible work policy brings, and we truly believe the future of work will gravitate towards our vision of the future.

Product at Whereby

We strongly believe in the superpowers of an empowered, passionate and cross-functional product team. We are a product-led business who strive to evolve our product alongside users, exceed their expectations and delight them. We try to ensure both that we are building the right thing and building the thing right. We analyse data, talk to users, prototype and iterate. We focus on discovering and solving user problems, not just building and shipping features. As a member of our product team you’ll take on a key role in this process and see your work be used by millions of users worldwide.

🔍 What we're looking for in our Director of Product Design

Our Product Design team is a crucial and talented team at Whereby. Like many of our teams (until recently) design has been operating without a function-specific head of department. The team has expressed a desire (and we feel the need as a business) to ensure design is advocated for at the leadership level, and also that the function is highly effective and admired. For this reason we're looking for someone who has experience advocating for, while building, a growing function of highly-qualified designers. We believe in the power of simple, beautiful product design, and know achieving our aims requires a head of the function who understands the painstakingly difficult task of making a product experience feel simple and effortless.

🌎 We believe in everyone

We fundamentally believe talent is distributed to all of us in equal measure. We open our doors (physical or url) to everyone and we see our differences as a strength; it’s this philosophy that drives us towards our mission.

This means we see your unique history as having a value money cannot buy; we believe in the strength of every intersection of race, religion or belief, ethnic origin, different physical ability, family structure, socio-economics, age, nationality or citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity.

⚒️ The nuts and bolts of the role*

* Please do not see everything in this job ad as "must have", but rather a guiding list of what we're looking for. We know that no candidate will be the perfect match for all we've mentioned in this posting, so don't be afraid to apply if you feel you're close to the brief but not "spot on"

Your attributes

• 🎨 Creative
• 💛 Empathetic and people-centric
• 📈 Commercial, with a product mindset
• 🥅 Goal-orientated
• 📊 Data-informed

Your previous experience

• Have extensive experience working with the design of a start-up or company with strong product-led culture (ideally SaaS, freemium model)
• Have experience in leading work on consistent design and branding across multiple products
• Experience leading senior professionals, and know how to engage an experienced team
• Having managed other managers (will likely be required in short-medium term)
• Worked in an agile, iterative work environment
• Experience working closely with international stakeholders in other functions (marketing, engineering, support)
• Experience with localisation of a product into various markets and languages
• You have managed remote teams, or teams with a hybrid distribution setup, and
• Are a really nice person with loads of ambition!

How we'll measure your success🌟

• Team happiness (we currently use the RANDs test, but will look at other metrics)
• Recruitment and onboarding
• Objective-setting and achievements within your function

Strategic responsibilities

• Ensure overall brand cohesiveness across all our products and channels,
• Building a strong Design and User Research team,
• Fostering a culture of experimentation and iteration, with data-driven decisions and outcome focus

Tactical responsibilities

• Function building of design team processes and principles
• Building a unique differentiated position for Whereby's brand and product in the market
• Establish Whereby as an authority on Product Design (also to attract great talent)
• Advocating for Design in the Whereby product roadmap and leadership discussions

Foundational responsibilities

• Team management
• Some design and UX work when required
• Shadowing the team and working directly with PMs from time to time
• Roadmapping and strategic decision making for the Design & User Research function
• Advocating as a voice for Product Design/User Research amongst your peers and leaders
• Recruitment, onboarding and team-growth

Your progression

• Manage a high-performance design team 
• With a commercial mindset you find joy and progression in hitting our goals and developing new milestones for yourself and the team
• You will be an important part of the Product Management team, giving input on the overall company and product strategy, from a design and user point of view
• As our company grows, you will need to work on promoting the design's role across the department and ensure alignment with other leaders