Director, Product Design

Smartsheet Inc; United Kingdom; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a forward-thinking company as the Director of Product Design, where you'll lead a talented team to create engaging user experiences for a leading work execution platform. This role focuses on mentoring, establishing design strategies, and collaborating across teams to innovate and enhance product offerings. With a strong emphasis on user needs and business objectives, you'll have the opportunity to shape the future of design while fostering a culture of creativity and excellence. If you are passionate about UX and thrive in a collaborative environment, this is the perfect opportunity to make a significant impact.

Benefits

Employer-paid Private Medical and Dental

Monthly pension contributions

Monthly stipend for productivity

25 days paid Holiday + Bank Holidays

Flexible Time Away Program

20 weeks fully paid Maternity Leave

12 weeks fully paid Paternity/Adoption Leave

Personal paid Volunteer Day

Access to Udemy online courses

Company Funded Perks

Qualifications

• 12+ years in a cross-functional role managing strategic projects.
• Experience leading and mentoring UX teams effectively.
• Passion for User Experience and innovative design solutions.

Responsibilities

• Drive and articulate a vision for the future of design.
• Manage UX designers and ensure human-centered processes.
• Collaborate with product teams to launch new features.

Skills

User Experience (UX)

Design Thinking

Team Leadership

Agile Methodologies

Visual Design

Communication Skills

Mentoring

Usability Testing

Problem Solving

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Design or related field

Master's Degree in Design or related field

Tools

Figma

Creative Cloud

Prototyping Tools

Job description

Smartsheet is a tech company with a human story to tell. We’re here to empower teams to manage projects, automate workflows, and rapidly build new secure solutions, using simple no-code tools. We’re revolutionaries – so for us changing the way the world works is all in a day’s work.

At Smartsheet, our purpose is to empower everyone to achieve more. As a member of the Experience Design team, you'll have the opportunity to shape the future of work, making our category-leading work execution platform valuable, intuitive, elegant, and engaging.

As the Director of Product Design, you will lead and grow a diverse and talented team of Product Designers in applying principles of design thinking to conceptualize engaging and personalized user experiences for our web and mobile apps. You have a solid history of making the people around you better. You drive quality and efficiency by establishing processes, developing talent, and leveraging your own expertise and experience to help coach your team to accomplish more than they might have without you. You see yourself as a team captain more than a coach.

You are skilled at scaling your influence and abilities. You love to collaborate with designers, user researchers, engineers, product managers, executives, and inspire them to do their best. You thrive on working well with others… and getting things done. You will represent the end user and evangelize human-centered methodologies across the product team to ensure innovative designs that truly meet people’s needs from first-time users to seasoned experts.

You will report to our VP of Product Design located in our Bellevue, WA office. You may choose to work from our Edinburgh or London offices, or you may choose to work remotely from anywhere in the UK.

You Will:

• Help establish, drive and articulate a vision for the future of design at Smartsheet.
• Define the user experience strategy and vision for your areas of oversight.
• Establish goals and target metrics that design decisions can be mapped to.
• Manage the day-to-day and strategic activities of UX designers, making sure that the human-centered process is properly planned and followed.
• Build, evolve and scale UX processes, standards, and tools.
• Mentor and coach UX designers in a motivating and supportive manner and keep the team on top of emerging UX techniques and tools.
• Develop career paths and programs tailored to individual team member professional development.
• Gain a deep understanding of user needs and goals and communicate them to cross functional product teams.
• Create alignment with other groups within the company by working collaboratively with product teams to launch new features and evolve existing ones based on an understanding of user needs, business objectives and technical constraints.
• Translate business goals into innovative, creative and engaging product experiences.
• Support other duties.

You Have:

• 12+ years of experience in a highly cross-functional role running strategic projects from idea through implementation.
• 6+ years leading & mentoring UX teams, manager of managers a plus.
• Successful experience leading a large team of designers (10+).
• Examples of broadly influential UX work that contributed directly to the achievement of business goals.
• Passion for the field of User Experience. Self motivated and enthusiastic; knows when it's necessary to seek out guidance.
• Experience facilitating activities to gather insights on user needs and goals and conducting usability testing.
• Experience finding simple, innovative solutions for complex problems.
• Experience with Agile methodologies.
• Strong visual design skills and sensibilities.
• Expert in Figma, Creative Cloud or other visual design, wireframing, and prototyping tools. Proficiency in rapid prototyping.
• Highly organized with planning, conducting, and tracking work.
• Excellent communication skills and interpersonal skills; ability to work successfully with teams across the organization, including Product Management and Engineering.
• Ability to articulate design decisions and advocate for the user.
• Employer-paid Private Medical and Dental, additional cost for family members
• Monthly contributions toward your pension
• Monthly stipend to support your work and productivity
• 25 days paid for Holiday + Bank Holidays + Flexible Time Away Program
• 20 weeks fully paid Maternity Leave
• 12 weeks fully paid Paternity/Adoption Leave
• Personal paid Volunteer Day to support our community
• Opportunities for professional growth and development including access to Udemy online courses
• Company Funded Perks including a counseling membership, salary sacrifice options, and your own personal Smartsheet account.
• Teleworking options from any registered location in the UK (role specific)

Get to Know Us:

At Smartsheet, we’ve created a place where everyone is welcome — people from all over the world, all backgrounds, all ages, all colors, and all beliefs working side by side. Here, everyone can make a difference and empower others to do the same. You’re encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn’t precisely match our job description—if your career path has been nontraditional, that will set you apart. At Smartsheet, we empower everyone, everywhere to change the way the world works—join us!

Equal Opportunity Employer:

Smartsheet is an Equal Opportunity (EEO) employer committed to fostering an inclusive environment with the best employees. It is our policy to provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants in accordance with applicable laws in the US, UK, Australia, Germany, Costa Rica, Japan, Bulgaria, and India. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran or disabled status, or genetic information.

If there are preparations we can make to help ensure you have a comfortable and positive interview experience, please let us know.

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