Role Overview

Interested in advancing the outcomes in the health of people and the planet through design, technology, and partnerships? Does solving some of the most complex problems in healthcare and climate tech get you fired up?! Read on.

At Sidebench we operate in empowered product teams that are purpose built to solve hard problems in ways that work for our clients, that their customers love, and make the world a better place. Our client partners range from early stage startups all the way to full scale enterprise partners and you’ll get exposed to a broad range of product experiences.

As a Manager of Product Design you will participate in all phases of the product development lifecycle, from strategy to discovery to delivery and through each iteration. You’ll work hand in hand with your product manager and engineering leadership to design and build effective products and you’ll be one of the main client facing roles on a product team working to bring the visions to life.

As a product designer, you’ll be deeply oriented around the users and the value your product is bringing to them. You’ll be anchoring your design decisions in the business outcomes you’re seeking to create and thoughtfully incorporate those outcomes and any constraints into the design of your products. You’ll work across multiple products with multiple product teams and you’ll be a key contributor and servant leader to your peers on the design team as well as the product and engineering teams. 

Key Areas of Responsibility

Servant Leadership: While you won’t have any direct reports, you’ll need to act as a leader that deeply understands the product development process and it’s important that you’re both a player and a coach to your peers on the Product Design team as well as every other team you collaborate with, including but not limited to Product and Engineering. 

Holistic Product Design: We all have our natural strengths, but you’ll need to bring a solid blend of skills across the entire spectrum of product design including user research, user experience, visual design, interaction design, and prototyping. As a client facing leader, you’ll need to visualize and communicate your design solutions via workflow diagrams, storyboards, click-through wireframes, high-fidelity screens, and design documentations.

Excellent Communication & Facilitation: In this key client facing role, you will confidently present to clients, peers, stakeholders and leadership, and articulate rationales behind design decisions while designing for a broad range of solutions and a number of different types of companies, personas, and scenarios. 

Product Design Evangelism: Like all Product leaders at Sidebench, you’ll be tasked with representing and promoting our product design philosophies by advocating for the value and benefits of our approach with prospects and client partners, executive briefings, marketing events, online consumer platforms, etc. You’ll work to create and drive the adoption of our product design processes and systems including forming UX standards, best practices, styles, patterns and guidelines in collaboration with the rest of the Product Design team and encourage them to contribute by introducing emerging design techniques and their appropriate usage.

Key Traits

Product Orientation: We expect our product designers to continuously collaborate with product managers and engineers. We expect that product designers participate in all phases of a product, from discovery to delivery to iteration and have a keen sense for how what they are designing will create value for the business and the users.

Outcomes Driven: You should be able to demonstrate experience designing with outcomes in mind and understand how the core levers of a business model might drive design decisions. The concept of KPIs, leading and lagging indicators, and the ability to articulate how your products have made a measurable difference in such is a must.

Empathetic Communicator: People should describe you as empathetic and as an excellent communicator. You should have the ability to really understand the person, their problems, and be able to “walk a mile in their shoes.” You should have excellent listening skills and an endless curiosity to understand the why behind everyone and everything. You will be required to constantly make presentations to the team, the VP of Product, company and client partner stakeholders as well as representing the business and the product in various external functions. 

Analytical & Inquisitive: You’ll need to have a superior ability to synthesize diverse and complex information and data to help inform hypotheses, test into solutions, and use feedback to design elegant experiences, solutions, workflows, and procedures that are usable, desirable, and valuable.

Key Outcomes

Products that make an impact:Your designs will be centered on creating real impact in one or all of the following categories; social, environmental, or economic. You understand that the decisions you make affect real people and real businesses and you’ll lead each design effort centered on that impact.

Incredibly Happy Clients: By executing on the outcomes you’re working to achieve your clients will be tremendously satisfied with our partnership resulting in expansions, reviews, and referrals.

Looked up to by your peers: Your strategic leadership and player coaching will materialize in your peers on the team viewing you as an incredible and impactful leader that they can learn and grow with. 

Qualifications

• You’re a servant leader, both with your internal teams and with both partners and clients 
• You have 3+ years of experience working in a product design role with additional experience in an operational capacity within a consultancy, agency or startup environment
• Created, implemented, and managed internal best practices and/or standard operating procedures
• You have experience creating client or stakeholder deliverables and leading workshops
• Expert level understanding of both the product design and the product development processes 
• Strong experience with custom software solutions, mobile applications, web experiences, enterprise level applications and architectures, and multi-sided platforms
• Hunger to learn quickly, high energy, ability to think on your toes, and motivation to be a key team member within a short period of time with the company
• Proven ability to motivate and execute with teams in a thoughtful and timely manner 
• Ability to build rapport with internal and external teams; a team-oriented culture champion
• Confidence, humility, creativity, a team player mentality, and a positive attitude are a must
• Interest in coaching and mentoring young talent without owning the day to day management responsibilities

Diverse Perspectives

We know that innovation thrives on product teams where diverse points of view come together to solve hard problems in ways that are just now possible. As such, we explicitly seek people that bring diverse life experiences, diverse educational backgrounds, diverse cultures, and diverse work experiences. Please be prepared to share with us how your perspective will bring something unique and valuable to our product teams. 

About Sidebench

Sidebench is an award-winning custom software development company on a mission to accelerate outcomes in the health of people and the planet through design, technology, and partnership. We are a diverse group of strategists, technologists, tinkerers, and thought leaders that collaborate with our partners to create compelling software solutions to some of the hardest problems in the world. We value a give-first mentality, empathy, curiosity, earning trust, challenging our own inertia, and playing the long game, and when we think about the future, both immediate and distant, we aspire to be an unconventional catalyst that helps create a world where all people thrive.