Role Overview

Sweetgreen is seeking a motivated and passionate Product Design Lead to join the Experience + Product Design team at sweetgreen. Through human-centered design principles, Product Designers understand and anticipate pain points, define vision states, and design + codify sweetgreen’s digital language across various touchpoints, including iOS & Android apps, web, Kiosk, digital menu boards, and more. 

This role will be the centralized owner of the digital design system, therefore strong visual design skills and experience with motion design are required. The Product Design Lead will also work closely with Sprint squads, Product Managers, Engineers, QA and stakeholders, to plan, estimate and execute pioneering interactive experiences for sweetgreen internal (store associates) and external customers.

Key Themes & Responsibilities

In order to be considered as successful in this role, you will need to accomplish the following objectives:

Systematic Design:  Product Designers must balance creative and systematic thinking to solve design problems. As our feature set grows in different forms, we must maintain a consistent and recognizable design system. 

• Within 30 days, contribute to the core digital design library, and by 60 days take ownership. Must show expert understanding of contemporary digital design practices and tools in order to maintain and evolve a living design library (we use Figma).
• Within 60 days, lead design execution for projects, from helping facilitate brainstorms to QA and evaluating user response. This also includes close collaboration with engineering to develop the componentized design system.
• Including, but not limited to: High fidelity wireframes, user flows, detailed UI design, motion design, prototyping, design system documentation.

Design Thinking: Human-Centered Design methodologies are required to solve our digital physical problems. Ability to design from the inside out by applying an understanding of business problems, customer needs + desires, and technology capabilities.

• Within 60 days, be able to show an expert understanding of a key customer problem  and exercises to create focus and alignment: i.e. audits, workshops, diagrammatic visuals, wireframes
• Within 90 days, show ability to unpack briefs to find core problems that aren't clearly stated and know when to incorporate insights & research.

Communication & Collaboration: Collaboration is the foundation of our process. Product Designers must be able to influence project outcomes through confident recommendations and presentation/communication style, while maintaining healthy internal relationships through servant leadership and authentic collaboration.

• Within 60 days, collaborate closely with Product Managers, engineers and other stakeholders in planning, execution, and post-launch to ensure the outcome solves business goals and satisfies the user.
• Present work with qualitative & quantitative rationale, to stakeholders and leadership team in a clear and convincing way.
• May involve management and mentorship of more junior Product Designers.

Product Strategy & Planning: Ability to understand and identify value and ROI to influence the roadmap. Organizational skills are required to plan, estimate and prioritize tasks from inception through launch and analysis.

• Lead estimation, project planning, workshops (from a Design perspective), orchestrate design reviews, and hold team accountable with clear action items
• Evaluate ROI of concepts, time/effort regarding project prioritization of features, epics and initiatives

Innovation: Inspire respective workstreams & Design team with industry trends, insights, and non-roadmap ideas.

• Within 60 days, introduce new opportunities outside of a prescribed briefed to your project team and Product Design team.
• Within 60 days, introduce emerging technologies, design and interaction trends to spark ideation.
• Within 120 days, creates high-fidelity proofs of concepts and package to influence roadmap.
• Within 120 days, lead a brown bag, workshop, or other knowledge sharing practice with the Design team and relevant workstreams.

Requirements

• Strong experience contributing to and evolving core design systems used across touchpoints and moments in the customer journey
• Excellent understanding and knowledge of Human Centered Design principles and methodologies
• Passion for developing and organizing design libraries
• Ability to manage ambiguity
• Solid organizational skills, including the ability to prioritize tasks, meet deadlines, and drive projects
• Experience planning and estimating large pieces of work
• Experience designing a variety of UX/Visual Design artifacts, such as: ecosystems, flows, wireframes, detailed UI, prototypes, etc.
• Strong presentation and communication skills (written, verbal and visual)
• Experience in UI motion design and ability to incorporate into work
• Fluency in industry best practices and tools such as Figma, Sketch, Jira, usertesting platforms such as Usertesting.com, prototyping tools such as Principle, Proto.io, etc.
• Familiarity with back-end and front-end development technologies such as HTML5, CSS, Javascript, API’s, etc.
• Outstanding portfolio of related work

Education & Experience

• 5+ years of agency or in-house experience (ideally both)
• Bachelor's degree (Master’s preferred) in design-related discipline: Interaction, Information or Graphic Design; Industrial or Product Design; Human-Computer Interaction; Design Planning; Communication Design

What you'll get

• Three different medical plans to suit your and your family's needs
• Dental and Vision insurance
• Flexible PTO plan
• 401k; company match of 50% up to 3% of employee contribution
• 5 months paid family leave; we believe in fully supporting new parents
• Employee HSA and FSA
• Complimentary greens
• An opportunity to make a real impact on the people around you, both by growing them and by connecting them to real food
• To live the sweetlife and celebrate your passion + purpose
• A collaborative team of people who live our core values and have your back
• A clear career path with opportunities for development, both personally and professionally
• Free sweetgreen swag

Come join the sweetlife!

About sweetgreen

sweetgreen is on a mission to build healthier communities by connecting people to real food. We passionately believe that real food should be convenient and accessible to everyone. Every day in each sweetgreen, our 3,500 team members make food from scratch, using fresh ingredients and produce delivered that morning. And in our local communities, we’re committed to leaving people better than we found them. We’re in the business of feeding people, and we’re out to change what that means.

sweetgreen provides equal opportunities for everyone that works for us and everyone that applies to join our team, without regard to sex or gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, pregnancy, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, any service, past, present, or future, in the uniformed services of the United States (military or veteran status), or any other consideration protected by federal, state, or local law.

sweetgreen participates in the federal government's E-Verify program to determine employment eligibility. To learn more about the E-Verify program, please click here.