Appello is seeking an exceptional full-time Product Design Lead who can effectively encourage innovative approaches while guiding clients and multi-disciplinary teams through the product development life-cycle; from identifying new opportunities and crafting product propositions, through to design, prototyping, testing and release. Collaboratively working alongside other team members, you will be reporting directly to the company executives. This is a fully remote role, so you can work from anywhere.
Responsibilities- Guiding Research and Strategy
- Lead product teams in defining the strategy, vision and user requirements for each project by proactively drafting design briefs that outline design iterations, prioritized concepts, scope and timelines/roadmaps in alignment with technical and business priorities.
- Lead product teams in their UX Research initiatives to better understand customer behaviors, pain points, needs and aspirations and how to best solve them.
- Identify new product improvement opportunities.
- Analyze how a new product satisfies market needs and consumer preferences.
- Stay up to date on current industry trends and market conditions.
- Modify and revise existing designs to meet changing customer preferences.
- Prepare and conduct user research and usability tests.
- Design and facilitate stakeholder workshops to ensure alignment/agreement on product vision. Experience of facilitating design sprints and ideation sessions.
- Collaborative Design and Development
- Lead product teams in their collaboration with clients, designers, developers and project managers to develop useful, beautiful digital products and services.
- Solve complex user experience problems by applying your creative thinking, logic and pragmatism.
- Communicate design ideas via Moodboards, Illustrations, Personas, Customer journey maps, IA Schematics (e.g. Activity task flows, Site maps), Wireframes, UI Designs, Prototypes and assets delivery.
- Coordinating with project managers and technical leads to ensure the integrity of design execution and timely delivery to clients.
- Help manage and grow designers within the product team; this includes hiring and mentoring all levels of designers to deliver their best work.
- Help cultivate the design culture of the team and company, by encouraging peer reviews, suggesting improvements to the way we work, promoting best practices in UX, UI, IXD, championing user-centric design thinking across the company, and maintaining a collaborative design process.
- You’re expected to be proactive, to plan and manage your own workload. We value individual creative thinking as highly as collaboration; if you spot an opportunity to improve a product or process we’ve created an environment in which you will be heard, a place to grow your ideas and produce the best work of your career.
- B.A./B.S. or M.A./M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Design, Business, Psychology or a related degree, or equivalent practical experience.
- 6-8+ years of hands-on experience, ideally having worked in a variety of sectors and contexts (in-house, startup, agency) with a proven track record of designing responsive digital products and services across mobile, web, desktop and beyond.
- Experience in building, managing and leading Product teams, Design Systems and Brand/Style Guidelines.
- A strong portfolio that demonstrates a strategic outlook with regard to a product’s current and future vision, combined with clear thinking and novel solutions that address business value and end-user needs.
- Experience working in lean/agile environments but agnostic to approach.
- Strong advocate for Product Design, with the ability to engage and educate stakeholders.
- Excellent English language skills (verbal and written), with the ability to influence a range of audiences. You have the communication skills to help set up frameworks and brainstorm initial concepts. You also have the ability to mentor others to deliver work, to make strategies come to life and to present work back to clients. Added bonus if you’re proficient in any other languages i.e. Russian or Ukrainian.
- The ability to write good UX-copy would be favourable.
Software requirements: Figma, Google Workspace, Slack, Trello. Nice to have skills: After Effects, Flinto or Principle, Sketch, Adobe CC Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator).