UX Manager.

The Company:

This scale-up has been on a journey to mature their product design practice and are now looking for a UX Manager to keep propelling them on this journey to product design practice excellence. You will coach, develop and empower Product Designers to keep harnessing the craft and enable them to solve problems that in turn solve problems for customers. They are looking for a UX 
Design Manager who shares their vision and adds value with their leadership capability and passion for design ops. 


The Role:

The Design Operations Manager will be central to maturing their product design practice to ensure the design team is set up for success. As the UX Design Manager, you will work on the machine that enables Product Designers as opposed to working as a Designer yourself. The key pillars of this role are leadership / coaching and design operations improvement. You will help the team deliver the best research-led work for its range of products in a complex and changing domain. 


Responsibilities:

• Lead the design team, setting up tangible measures of success and empowering them in every step of the process.
• Drive customer value and empower Product Designers to be true 'product thinkers' who understand the user deeply as well as the commercial outcomes.  
• Be a part of the leadership team, helping support the decisions and strategy the company takes in order to achieve its vision, mission, and business goals.
• Ensure harmony between design strategy, design ops, design execution, and delivery.
• Provide line management and day-to-day support for Designers, running design team reviews, and weekly team meetings. 
• Provide personal professional development support, including building and refining the team’s skills matrix and the running of performance reviews.
• Run regular one-one meetings with Product Designers to motivate and encourage providing ongoing feedback to help them continue to grow.
• Use your deep experience in Product Design to define design best practices and standards, with a focus on outcomes, value delivery, and incremental improvement.
• Formalise and drive Product Design processes to improve discoverability and engagement for the team and the company as a whole.
• Optimise collaboration between the design team and other teams in the company, including developer collaboration and handoff.
• Continue to set up strong research operations that engage with customers to understand their pains and problems, leaning on your background in UX research to ensure end-to-end integration of research and UX design functions in the team.
• Facilitate workshops and design sprints to aid collaboration within and between product teams and customers, as well as train the designers and other members to run their own workshops and design sprints.
• Define a solution to enable the team to measure metrics of success, and ensure designers are able to align with them. 
• Be a driving force behind the design and product-led culture of the business. 

About You:

Our ideal candidate has been a high-profile UX / Product Designer and having moved into leadership has realized they can add more value in leadership, empowering others, setting up processes that make sense and driving a team to success.  

• 5+ years of design experience as a Senior UX Designer in a digital product company, consultancy or agency. 
• 3+ years experience in managing design teams, including the demonstration of practice development, line manager responsibilities, and overall ownership of the delivery of design.
• You are all about the people: you are a people-orientated with a passion for developing teams to do their best work.
• Change management experience, with some prior exposure to large modernisation projects for established products.
• A significant amount of user research experience across complex domains, including conducting remote user interviews and contextual inquiry, design sprints, and more and have implemented research ops into a business.
• You are a "product thinker' and ideally, your experience lies within a product company. 
• Mastery of the modern product design toolset and experience working with or setting up comprehensive and complex Design Systems. 
• You are technically minded, with confidence in dealing with information architecture and abstract problem-solving.
• A passion for prioritising outcomes over output. This business is after a leader who is relentlessly pragmatic, who values solving customer problems - in a measurable way - instead of just raw delivery.
• Your skill as a communicator is one of your core strengths, you are able to have robust discussions, negotiate and influence with a level of emotional intelligence at every interaction. 

For more information please call or text Sophia at BLACKROC on 0450 551 511. Alternatively to submit your application, please click below.