The Opportunity
We are seeking a highly skilled and proactive Product Design Director to join our dynamic team in Bangalore. This individual will play a critical role in growing the design function to make Bangalore a center of design excellence within Sitetracker. This will require diligence, creative problem-solving, intense collaboration, and excellent communication. In this role, you will identify and address challenges faced by users, designers, and the design department. You will move forward through significant unknowns, seeking out answers to groundbreaking or unformed questions.
As a Manager, you will be responsible for recruiting, onboarding, and developing the local design team. You have a servant-leader mentality to ensure that our local team has the resources, guidance, standards, and skills necessary.
As an individual contributor, you will be responsible for design within your scrum team. This means immersing yourself in our customers’ complex and diverse B2B workflows and finding creative solutions within our Salesforce-based platform.
Because of collaboration with colleagues in the US and Europe, it will involve significant nighttime work (average of 3-4 nights per week until 10 pm). You will report to the Director of Product Design based in the United States.
The Skill Set
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Organizational Leadership: Advance the design culture within Sitetracker
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Cross-Department Engagement:
- Collaborate with various departments across the organization, especially Product Management, to ensure that designers are set up for success.
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Stakeholder Management: Manage stakeholders in other departments, ensuring deep and consistent collaboration – both to gain maximum benefit from our colleagues’ deep knowledge of our users and to align them behind our solutions. Excellent communication and presentation skills
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Team Leadership & Management: Manage a team of 3-5 designers, with a focus on fostering skills and autonomy
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Team Development: Recruit high-quality design candidates, then enhance high-level design skills, ensuring independence from the US team through original user research and creative problem-solving. Adopt a non-hierarchical, coaching approach to leadership, focusing on growing the team’s skills and capabilities rather than directive management.
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Team Management: Manage a team of 3-4 designers, including conducting performance reviews and other management tasks.
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Industry Knowledge: Increase the team's knowledge of the industries we work in, including exploring new verticals we have not yet entered. Develop a deep understanding of complex B2B workflows to inform design decisions.
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Resource Creation: Identify needs within the design team and create resources and tools to support their growth and productivity.
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Full-stack Design for a Scrum Team: Leading design for your Scrum team, which at Sitetracker is a crucial role. You’ll take a high-level “what” idea from Product Management, and:
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Thorough User Research: Conducted by both internal experts and customers, to identify core needs across multiple industries
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Creative Solutions Within Technical Constraints: identify ways to meet our users’ needs by working thoughtfully with the constraints imposed by our Salesforce-based system
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Design System: Ability to use and nurture an early-stage design system
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Stakeholder Alignment: Ensure key people across the organization are aligned with your solutions, and aware of both the solutions and the deprioritized needs.
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Collaborate with Engineers: ensure that engineering and QA have what they need to to get these solutions built well.
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Measure and Telegraph Success & Learnings: Embed metrics so that we know what’s working, and learn from what’s not working.
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Salesforce Background: Ideally, experience working with Salesforce-based systems and understanding the technical constraints involved.
Within 60 Days, You’ll…
- Meet with key stakeholders across departments to understand their design needs and challenges. Develop a strategy to align design processes with organizational structure and goals.
- Assess the current design team’s skills and identify immediate areas for development. Develop a comprehensive plan for enhancing the design skills within the Bangalore team.
- Start contributing to the design work of your scrum team, including ideas based on original user research
Within 180 Days, You’ll…
- Ensure the Bangalore design team operates independently and at a high level, producing innovative solutions.
- Foster a culture of continuous improvement and proactive problem-solving within the team.
- Maintain strong cross-departmental relationships to ensure ongoing alignment and collaboration.
- Achieve key design milestones for your scrum team, contributing to overall product success.
- Evaluate the team's performance based on their ability to deliver independent, insightful, feasible, and high-quality work.
- Contribute significant new resources and tools to support the design team’s productivity.
Within 365 Days, You’ll…
- Lead the team to successfully launch major products or features.
- Position the design team as a center of excellence within the company.
- Implement scalable design systems and frameworks.
- Achieve high levels of employee satisfaction and retention.
- Regularly review and analyze design performance metrics, presenting achievements to senior leadership.
