Head of Program Design

Head of Program Design

Braven is a national nonprofit that prepares promising college students to secure a strong first opportunity after college graduation through a career-accelerating program. In order to achieve its ambition of serving 80,000–100,000 Fellows over the next decade, Braven is hiring a Head of Program Design who will own the evolution, quality, and integrity of every program experience Braven puts in front of students, volunteers, and staff, serving as both the lead builder and the person responsible for setting the standards for how those experiences are designed.

Braven's program is built around a core belief: that students build career readiness by developing the right skills, networks, experiences, and confidence. Everything the Design team builds is in service of that equation. As the leader of the Design team and a member of the Product Leadership Team, you will translate evidence from Braven's research and real-time signals from the field into high-quality, pedagogically sound program assets and learning sequences that can be delivered across dozens of campuses with varying academic lengths (e.g., semester, quarter, summer school, etc.) at scale.

You hold the line on adult learning best practices regardless of timeline pressure or competing priorities, and you ensure that every staff member and volunteer who facilitates a Braven program experience understands both what they're teaching and why it's built the way it is. We're also looking for someone with a genuinely entrepreneurial orientation, someone who is deeply curious about how other organizations are solving the college-to-career challenge, and who brings that curiosity back into how Braven evolves its own approach. Critically, this person must be able to hold two things as connected rather than in tension: the commitment to human-centered, pedagogically excellent design and the imperative to simplify and scale. The program has to work for the student sitting in front of it and for the institution delivering it at volume. Seeing those as the same challenge — not competing ones — is a prerequisite for excellence in this role.

This role is on the Product team and reports directly to the Chief Product Officer.

What You'll Do

• Build, Steward, and Evolve Braven's Program Experience (30%)
• Design and evolve the entire program experience continuum, which starts with the Accelerator course and extends to supporting our Fellows for 6 months after graduation.
• Maintain a growing high-quality multi-modal library (in-person, virtual, and on-demand) of program experiences, including workshops, learning modules, facilitated sequences, stand-alone resources, on-demand tools, and event designs that help students build the skills, networks, experiences, and confidence needed to secure strong first opportunities after college.
• Create and pilot new program assets in response to what program staff is observing in the field and/or our higher education partners lift up as a need/interest — when teams flag that students are struggling or that a specific need has emerged, your team builds the response, keeping scale and simplicity front and center.
• Translate findings from Braven's research team into concrete design decisions, ensuring that what the evidence says students need is actually reflected in how every experience is structured, sequenced, and facilitated, partnering with execution teams to ensure the program is delivered as intended
• Maintain and refresh program assets over time by updating content regularly based on stakeholder feedback, student outcome data, and shifts in the college-to-career landscape, including staying up to speed on how the context is shifting with students (e.g., pandemic moment that required more online to a digital learning fatigue moment six years after the pandemic) and/or the labor market (e.g., employers are scaling up dramatically so job acquisition is easier including remote work to labor market is shrinking because of over hiring and now how AI is shaping the realities students face in the job market)
• Keep an eye towards what must be true at scale, adjusting designs over time based on feasibility constraints or new technology realities that have ripple effects into designs.
• Be the consummate learner and consumer of our in-person and digital products, in order to stay proximate to the field as well as on the cutting edge of what is to come

• Set and Hold the Standard for Quality and Integrity of Program Experiences (25%)
• Define, ensure the execution of, and evolve Braven's standards for high-quality program design, including how experiences are structured, how long they run, how learning is assessed, and how facilitation is approached.
• Ensure all program experiences are grounded in adult learning science, cultural competence (including that of a particular higher education institution), and reflect a deep understanding of Braven's students, predominantly first-generation college students and students from low-income backgrounds, navigating the transition from college to career.
• Stay current on the external field — career readiness research, employer expectations, evolving best practices in adult learning, highly-resourced colleges' career preparation evolutions, digital tools, and bring that knowledge into Braven's design work.

• Prepare Staff and Volunteers to Facilitate with Confidence and Fidelity (20%)
• Design and deliver ongoing training that equips program staff and volunteers who are on the front lines with students every day to understand Braven's approach to career readiness topics, and can deliver to students coherent, consistent guidance.
• Design and deliver training on design intent so that facilitators understand why an experience is built the way it is, and can make good judgment calls when they need to adapt in the moment.
• Ensure training and staff enablement are built into each new program from the start, making them a core part of a complete, high-quality experience.
• Lead conversations with staff about what is likely to come next in the programmatic experience's evolution.

• Lead the Team and Shape Program Strategy (25%)
• Lead, develop, and grow a team of designers who are responsible for the full scope of design work across Braven's program experience, from the Accelerator course to post-course support for Fellows, which lasts until six months post graduation.
• Manage the team as well as the team's mental agility in a way that allows for business as usual, as well as the ability to flex, be nimble, and start to innovate in a manner that meets the moment.
• Serve as a member of Braven's Product Leadership Team, contributing design expertise to cross-functional decisions about what the program should do next, how it should evolve, and what it will take to deliver it at scale.
• Partner with colleagues across Research, Data, Program Delivery, and Operations to ensure design decisions are grounded in evidence, informed by what's happening in the field, and set up to be delivered well.
• Engage directly, including online and ground-based visits with the field to inform perspective.
• Bring a constant eye toward program simplification while regularly asking which design elements are truly essential for student outcomes, where the program has accumulated complexity that doesn't drive value, and how to redesign experiences that are both excellent and more scalable over time.
• Partner across the organization with program delivery teams, operations, and technology to identify where design changes could unlock scale, and help Braven distill the program architecture toward what it truly needs to be as it grows.
• Help scope and grow the Design team as the organization scales toward serving 25,000+ Fellows.
• Serve as a member of the "One Braven" leadership team, contributing to org-wide strategy and stewarding a healthy, high-performing culture for both your immediate team and the broader organization.
• Other duties as assigned.

Minimum Requirements

• Education: BS/BA
• 10+ years of experience designing clear, engaging, purposeful, and culturally competent learning experiences
• 3+ years of experience managing a team toward outcomes

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree or other certification in learning design, instructional design, or a related field
• Expert practitioner in human-centered design and adult learning science, with a strong point of view on what makes a learning experience work for adults, especially adults navigating high-stakes career moments
• Demonstrated experience building and maintaining a program or curriculum library that serves multiple delivery teams or contexts. You know how to design for reuse, not just for one-time use
• Experience designing human-centered learning experiences that scale through technology.
• Experience designing training for the people who deliver your programs, not just the content itself, but the facilitation guides, design rationale, and enablement that help others teach it well