Role.  An overview of the opportunity:

Skupos is seeking a seasoned hands-on Director of Product Design who is a strong leader and enjoys working collaboratively with a small design team. We are looking for an exceptional designer who is able to work with limited direction and adapt in a fast-paced environment. A designer who accepts constructive feedback and looks to constantly improve their craft, while also providing insightful feedback to our team’s work during design reviews.

The Director of Product Design will be expected to bring beautiful, modern, and consistent end-to-end visuals and experiences to products. This will require bringing your passion for design to the research, design, and product development processes, which will include collaboration with stakeholders across our clients and users, and Skupos UX, sales, client management, product management, & engineering teams. 

We expect a spontaneous and innovative creative process, executing UX design work that includes: research, concepts, prototypes, detailed design, and implementation. Your approach should be influenced by a clear vision of the future of UX and constantly pursue forward-thinking design. Above all, the candidate should be a master of storytelling and visualizing experiences with a portfolio that demonstrates the ability to create experiences that delight consumers.

The right candidate will ensure full integration of brand, industrial design, user interface, graphic design, usability, and business strategy. The candidate will have demonstrated ability to deliver through all stages of product development from initial ideation to shipping and supporting multiple generations of the final product.

Responsibilities.  Your responsibilities will include:

• Champion user-centered design to create experiences that meet user needs and address business goals
• Collaborate with key project team members, including visual designers, product managers, engineers, and stakeholders to deliver end-to-end solutions
• Establish a product UX vision & inspire a small team of designers to deliver and meet experience, schedule, and product goals
• Define user experience quality metrics and work across teams to meet user and business goals
• Establish a UX design thinking and development process across all Skupos products
• Work within design to coordinate testing efforts / interpret results
• Work with Product Managers to build specs and requirements through wireframing and rapid prototyping
• Iterate and output optimal creative deliverables from flow diagrams, wireframes and low-fidelity prototypes to complex user flows to final visual QA
• Effectively communicate with developers through the implementation phase to realize design vision
• Working with Marketing teams on website updates, email templates,  landing page implementation
• Communicate, defend, and build consensus around UX architecture and interaction design direction            

Experience.  Candidates should have:

• Bachelor’s Degree (or equivalent experience) in visual design, interaction design, human interaction sociology, psychology, or related disciplines
• 7+ years of experience in designing user experience, user interface, information architectures, interaction design, user research, prototyping and usability testing for CPG retailer business or SMB market 
• 5+ years of experience leading creative teams and building a culture for creative excellence
• Experience designing UI frameworks (ex: Bootstrap, Semantic, Material etc.) 
• Demonstrated experience designing Enterprise products (digital apps)
• Demonstrable experience inventing and innovating
• An insatiable thirst for growing and learning - approaching new failures as opportunities to learn on the way to building the next big thing
• An infectious positivity and can-do approach to tricky problem solving
• Ability to understand and distill complex problems into clean solutions
• A track record establishing great relationships and working with other disciplines, such as product management, marketing, and engineering
• A strong body of work that shows your UX track record of high-quality solutions that address user problems and business goals
• Fluency in best practices for information architecture and design, as well as strong knowledge of usability principles and technique
• Experience working within agile development methodologies
• Familiarity with Figma, InVision, Adobe Suite, Sketch, Axure and/or other UX/UI design tools

Skills.  We are looking for:

• Able to create email templates from-scratch and understanding the limitations of email HTML
• Proficiency in technical design programming languages (HTML, CSS, ReactJS)
• Experience integrating CMS data (i.e. Contentful) into React views
• Experience working with marketing integrations (i.e. Marketo, Google Analytics)
• Animation skills
• Web/landing page design
• Photography and video
• 3D modelling
• Pre-press and print design knowledge
• Must have excellent teamwork, communication, and technical problem-solving skills to contribute within a multi-functional and multi-disciplined team
• Obsessed with the relentless pursuit of UX perfection working inside an iterative and agile development environment
• Must be able to work with minimal supervision in a fluid, fast-paced and truly agile environment
• Must have experience in developing, creating, establishing and maintaining brand and product design systems for a young and growing company

Salary is based on location and experience.

Salary range in San Francisco, CA: $170,000 - $190,000