Product Design Director oversees the implementation of product design policies, objectives, and initiatives. Leads development of new products and improvements to existing products or product lines. Being a Product Design Director evaluates the feasibility of design ideas. Requires a bachelor’s degree. Additionally, Product Design Director demonstrates expertise in a variety of the field’s concepts, practices, and procedures. Typically reports to top management. The Product Design Director manages a departmental sub-function within a broader departmental function. Creates functional strategies and specific objectives for the sub-function and develops budgets/policies/procedures to support the functional infrastructure. Deep knowledge of the managed sub-function and solid knowledge of the overall departmental function. To be a Product Design Director typically requires 5+ years of managerial experience.
Director of Product Design Job Description Template
Our company is looking for a Director of Product Design to join our team.
Responsibilities:
- Provide creative output and direction to ensure the overall vision for the product is achieved;
- Lead, recruit, coach, and mentor a team of world-class product designers and user researchers;
- Collaborate with members of cross-functional teams and be a champion for user-centered culture and design practices;
- Create visually engaging, innovative and functional digital products;
- Encourage cross-functional collaboration and communicate the impact of this practice for design;
- Work closely with product managers, engineers, QA and their leaders to ensure a cohesive user experience across all products;
- Organize teams that can provide design solutions effectively and with excellence across all departments;
- Establish metrics and measurable goals to ensure a visibility into design’s impact to business;
- Advocate the importance of User Centered Design and mentoring designers on design process and deliverable;
- Drive a framework to ensure career progression and development paths for designers;
- Identify improvement opportunities within the scope of design and other teams functioning holistically;
- Build design culture that encourages innovation while balancing the need for optimization;
- Mentor and grow a team of world-class design talent;
- Communicate value of design thinking and a customer-first approach to strategy across all areas of the business;
- Partner closely with leaders in engineering, product, sales, marketing and others to constantly improve on communication and efficiency practices.
Requirements:
- Deep knowledge of UX research and appropriate application of methodologies;
- 3+ years experience as a Design Director or UX Design Manager;
- Self-motivated and organized, with excellent collaboration skills;
- 2+ years experience as a product designer;
- Portfolio with strong case studies of leading successful product design and evolution;
- Strong experience driving brand strategy within product;
- Deep knowledge of design systems, information architecture, and Material and iOS design languages;
- Experience partnering with marketing stakeholders to deliver on product marketing deliverables;
- Have 4-6+ years of experience shipping products and collaborating with developers;
- Thrive in a dynamic fast-paced environment where you own products from start to finish, and make decisions quickly and independently;
- 3+ years leading a design team;
- Familiar with tools such as GITHub, to collaborate with engineers to manage design assets;
- Solid understanding of user-centred design methods across the digital product design process;
- Knowledge and awareness of front-end technologies such as CSS/HTMLEnjoy executing on multiple/diverse projects and iterating intensely;
- Experience with hi-fidelity prototyping tools.