Lead Product Designer
- Employer
- New Visions for Public Schools
- Location
- New York, NY, US
- Salary
- Competitive
- Posted
- Jun 24, 2019
- Ref
- 1747354
- Job Category
- Product, Services & Policy, Product Development / Engineering
Summary
New Visions for Public Schools is dedicated to empowering school leaders, teachers, and administrators with modern technology to effectively manage the complex work of teaching and learning.
Our digital products include the New Visions Data Portal, a comprehensive school management platform, used by over 350 NYC schools, as well as some of the most popular Add-ons in the GSuite marketplace (Doctopus, autoCrat, formMule, and many more), which have helped thousands of teachers around the world simplify their workflow, personalize their feedback, and communicate more efficiently with students and families.
Schools have specific and limited opportunities over the course of the school year to engage in a set of high stakes activities that will impact student outcomes, such as programming, academic interventions, and postsecondary planning. Our Data Portal helps schools seize every opportunity for student success -- alerting educators to critical changes in student performance, nudging staff to take specific actions, and tracking student progress in interventions. Our goal is to simplify complex managerial challenges so that school leaders and educators can focus on supporting their students to graduate and succeed beyond high school.
We're looking for a thoughtful and passionate Lead Product Designer to join our team. You will work directly with product managers, designers, and stakeholders to solve the most complex problems in urban K-12 education, and with engineers to build performant, user-centric products our educators will love. You will lead and mentor a team of designers, managing the day-to-day work of the team as well as supporting the career growth of team members. You will learn and grow alongside your colleagues in a highly collaborative, mission-driven environment.
Key Responsibilities
You are a mentor and a leader
You enjoy managing and training team members and understand how to maximize each team member’s unique skills and strengths. You are skilled at accomplishing things through other people while helping them to grow. You can provide leadership for peers, subordinates, and partners, and know how to communicate ideas to get teams aligned and moving forward together.
You ask the right questions
At every stage of the design process you know what questions to ask. During the discovery phase, you are adept at probing for underlying assumptions and honing in on the true problem. You know how to lead user research initiatives to get past surface-level issues and identify the underlying causes of user needs. During the prototyping and wireframing phase, you know how to lead design critiques and usability tests that help designers identify solution improvements. When presenting designs, you are able to interrogate responses from stakeholders to help us collect deeper, more insightful feedback.
You love data
You are skilled at extracting answers from both qualitative and quantitative data. You have a have strong organizational and analytical thinking skills, with a track record of breaking down complex content into manageable chunks. You are comfortable examining data, determining what’s important, noting patterns, and coming to conclusions.
You see the big picture
You enjoy thinking about how to improve the product over the long-term, but are able to balance this vision for the future with short-term product design needs. You are able to rapidly produce multiple concepts and prototypes, and know when to apply high-fidelity detail, and when to make low-fi sketches and prototypes.
You thrive on collaboration
You're excited to work cross-functionally with other teams and you’re skilled at establishing and cultivating strong relationships with all types of people. You have a positive attitude, a sense of humor, and can help the team navigate high stress situations. You are willing to give and accept constructive criticism and rapidly adapt to feedback.
Nice to Haves
New Visions for Public Schools is an equal opportunity employer. It is the policy of New Visions that all employees and applicants for employment will be treated in all respects on the basis of their merit and qualifications and without regards to their race, color, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion, gender, military status, marital status, ancestry, or any other reason prohibited by law.
New Visions believes that our teams should reflect the diverse communities we serve and that our culture and internal structures should be inclusive and equitable for all employees. We also recognize that perspectives from communities that have been historically marginalized are critical to the work we do. Hence, we strongly encourage applications from individuals living in the communities that we serve or who are members of historically marginalized communities.
New Visions provides a comprehensive and competitive compensation and benefits package in addition to the opportunity to make a significant impact on education reform and in the lives of urban youth.
New Visions for Public Schools is dedicated to empowering school leaders, teachers, and administrators with modern technology to effectively manage the complex work of teaching and learning.
Our digital products include the New Visions Data Portal, a comprehensive school management platform, used by over 350 NYC schools, as well as some of the most popular Add-ons in the GSuite marketplace (Doctopus, autoCrat, formMule, and many more), which have helped thousands of teachers around the world simplify their workflow, personalize their feedback, and communicate more efficiently with students and families.
Schools have specific and limited opportunities over the course of the school year to engage in a set of high stakes activities that will impact student outcomes, such as programming, academic interventions, and postsecondary planning. Our Data Portal helps schools seize every opportunity for student success -- alerting educators to critical changes in student performance, nudging staff to take specific actions, and tracking student progress in interventions. Our goal is to simplify complex managerial challenges so that school leaders and educators can focus on supporting their students to graduate and succeed beyond high school.
We're looking for a thoughtful and passionate Lead Product Designer to join our team. You will work directly with product managers, designers, and stakeholders to solve the most complex problems in urban K-12 education, and with engineers to build performant, user-centric products our educators will love. You will lead and mentor a team of designers, managing the day-to-day work of the team as well as supporting the career growth of team members. You will learn and grow alongside your colleagues in a highly collaborative, mission-driven environment.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the product design process and decision-making including planning, prioritizing, and establishing realistic timelines for projects.
- Collaborate closely with product managers and senior leadership to create solutions that achieve business and end user goals.
- Supervise, mentor and support the career growth of design team members.
- Lead user research and usability testing initiatives to iterate on product solutions.
- Lead design review sessions and cycle of feedback, revisions, etc.
- Ensure consistency across all of our products & integrations by working within our established design system and making updates where necessary.
- Bachelor’s Degree
- Online portfolio with case studies of relevant UX/UI projects that demonstrates a history of successful design implementations
- 5+ years of professional experience in UX design, prototyping, visual design, and user research, including 2+ years managing designers
- Experience working in a cross-functional Agile development process, such as Scrum or Kanban
- Advanced knowledge of web standards and UX best practices
- Advanced knowledge of typography, information hierarchy, color, and other UI concerns
- Advanced knowledge of leading design software, including Sketch, Zeplin, and Adobe Creative Cloud and experience documenting designs
- Strong understanding of web capabilities, including HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
You are a mentor and a leader
You enjoy managing and training team members and understand how to maximize each team member’s unique skills and strengths. You are skilled at accomplishing things through other people while helping them to grow. You can provide leadership for peers, subordinates, and partners, and know how to communicate ideas to get teams aligned and moving forward together.
You ask the right questions
At every stage of the design process you know what questions to ask. During the discovery phase, you are adept at probing for underlying assumptions and honing in on the true problem. You know how to lead user research initiatives to get past surface-level issues and identify the underlying causes of user needs. During the prototyping and wireframing phase, you know how to lead design critiques and usability tests that help designers identify solution improvements. When presenting designs, you are able to interrogate responses from stakeholders to help us collect deeper, more insightful feedback.
You love data
You are skilled at extracting answers from both qualitative and quantitative data. You have a have strong organizational and analytical thinking skills, with a track record of breaking down complex content into manageable chunks. You are comfortable examining data, determining what’s important, noting patterns, and coming to conclusions.
You see the big picture
You enjoy thinking about how to improve the product over the long-term, but are able to balance this vision for the future with short-term product design needs. You are able to rapidly produce multiple concepts and prototypes, and know when to apply high-fidelity detail, and when to make low-fi sketches and prototypes.
You thrive on collaboration
You're excited to work cross-functionally with other teams and you’re skilled at establishing and cultivating strong relationships with all types of people. You have a positive attitude, a sense of humor, and can help the team navigate high stress situations. You are willing to give and accept constructive criticism and rapidly adapt to feedback.
Nice to Haves
- Knowledge of NYC school system
- Advanced knowledge of Javascript
- Experience with Git, Vue and/or Angular
New Visions for Public Schools is an equal opportunity employer. It is the policy of New Visions that all employees and applicants for employment will be treated in all respects on the basis of their merit and qualifications and without regards to their race, color, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion, gender, military status, marital status, ancestry, or any other reason prohibited by law.
New Visions believes that our teams should reflect the diverse communities we serve and that our culture and internal structures should be inclusive and equitable for all employees. We also recognize that perspectives from communities that have been historically marginalized are critical to the work we do. Hence, we strongly encourage applications from individuals living in the communities that we serve or who are members of historically marginalized communities.
New Visions provides a comprehensive and competitive compensation and benefits package in addition to the opportunity to make a significant impact on education reform and in the lives of urban youth.