Manager, Product Design
Description
The Position
Do you dream about creating a more sustainable future? At Uplight, we are motivating energy users and providers to accelerate the clean energy ecosystem. Working with over 90 of the world’s leading electric and gas utilities, Uplight provides an end-to-end customer energy experience. Uplight delivers personalized experiences that customers have now come to expect–improving satisfaction, increasing revenue, reducing the cost to serve, and contributing to carbon reduction goals. We are B Corp certified, enabling us to put our values into action by not only making decisions for the benefit of our shareholders, but also for our customers, environment, employees, and community.
We are seeking a Manager, Product Design to join our team and help us achieve our ambitious goals for our business and the planet.
What you will contribute:
- People Management
- Manage a team of product designers to deliver exceptional design solutions that align with the company's goals and objectives.
- Play a leadership role within the design organization, providing guidance, mentorship, and support to foster direct reports’ growth and development
- Build an inclusive, safe culture where team members feel comfortable taking risks and being vulnerable.
- Manage the performance of the designers on their team inline with Uplight review cadence and be available and responsive to direct reports.
- Build and grow the design team in collaboration with design leadership, with an eye towards a well-rounded team that lives Uplight’s values.
- Leadership
- Be a thread between product design individual contributors, product design leadership and product management.
- Foster a culture of design excellence, promoting collaboration, and advocating for user-centric design principles throughout the organization.
- Work on complex assignments requiring independent action and a high degree of initiative to resolve issues.
- Make recommendations for new procedures, especially in service of creating scalable efficiencies within their domain(s), leaning on and collaborating with other team leadership across the business.
- Holds the production team and peers in other roles accountable.
- Be a player / coach role for a portion of time. Will need to collaborate with design leadership to further define based on your unique skills..
- Strategy
- Accountable for the success of their domain(s), design initiatives and the processes supporting their implementation and adoption.
- Oversee design processes, set design strategies, define and scope, allocate resources, and ensure that projects are completed on time
- Collaborate with other stakeholders such as product managers, product marketing managers, engineers, to define product requirements and prioritize design initiatives.
- Systems thinking and champion to ensure a consistent, reusable and cohesive user experience across all products with a Platform-first approach
- Make key decisions, as well as define and scope work for projects related to their domain(s) in collaboration with product managers, staff designers and design leadership
- A customer-focused mindset and can speak to the impact of the experience they’ve shipped in tangible terms the business understands.
- Strong opinions loosely held and a willingness to engage in constructive debates about scope and tradeoffs to build alignment and unblock work.You’ve built great relationships with cross functional collaborators and know how to model this for your team.
- Communication and collaboration skills that enable you to explain the impact of your work, tradeoffs you’ve made, lessons learned, and design rationale, and generate alignment and enthusiasm across the company.
- Ability to embrace ambiguous situations as opportunities to add clarity.
What you bring to Uplight:
- Experience & Hard Design Skills
- Typically requires a minimum of 7–10 years of related experience.
- Strong understanding of multiple design offerings, wide-ranging experiences, uses professional methods and company objectives to resolve complex issues in efficient and effective ways.
- An attitude ‘in service of your audience’ and finding ways to understand their needs and validate solutions in service of those needs.
- An ability to think beyond the pixels and design for the whole experience or process.
- Stays up-to-date with industry trends, best practices, and emerging technologies in product design and user experience.
- Proficient in design tools such as Figma (primary tool for design and prototypes), Sketch, Adobe suite (primarily Illustrator and InDesign), Lucid, Miro, Filestage, Usertesting.com, Respondent, etc.
- Leadership & Management
- Inspires, motivates, and leads product designers across experience levels to do their best work.
- Uses processes and company objectives to resolve complex staffing issues.
- Often advises Product, Product Marketing, and Sales on large new projects being scoped.
- Demonstrates commitment to Uplight core values and Design team principles; a leader-by-example.
- Creates loyalty and motivation in the team.
- Regularly provides recognition and development opportunities for their reports.
- Recognizes different working styles among team members and balances standardization and processes with the diverse needs of the team.
- Holds the production team and peers in other roles accountable.
- Communication & Collaboration
- Provides clear, actionable, thoughtful and empowering feedback.
- Brings transparency to their team
- Articulates a clear point of view and vision.
- Cascades valuable information to their team effectively.
- Excellent communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to effectively articulate design concepts and rationale to stakeholders at all levels, as well as collaborate across varied stakeholder groups and skillset types
- Builds productive working relationships with key internal and external stakeholders, and serves as a credible outward and client-facing resource.
- Knows how and when to negotiate trade-offs.
- Experience with making complex services easily digestible for an audience.
- Proactively brings in business context from elsewhere across Uplight.
- Collaborates with peers across disciplines for guidance on solving complex processes, team culture, and hiring challenges.
- Proactively seek out advice and critique from those in other disciplines on their work or process.
Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women, marginalized genders and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Uplight we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
What makes working at Uplight amazing:
In addition to all the standard medical and dental benefits, that kick in Day 1, we are:
- Proud to be over 500+ purpose-driven individuals helping to create a more sustainable planet.
- Committed to the environment, our employees, and our communities.
- Focused on providing cross-functional work, collaboration, and development.
- Committed to taking our work and mission seriously and….we love to laugh!
We also provide:
- 401k Match
- Medical, vision, and dental insurance
- Monthly wellness stipend
- Peer to peer recognition program
- Management by objectives bonus plan
- Innovative flexible time off policy
- Exceptionally collaborative and cool office spaces
Salary Range: $135,000 to $170,000
In accordance with the Colorado Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, the approximate annual base compensation range is listed above. The actual offer, reflecting the total compensation package and benefits, will be determined by a number of factors including the applicant's experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity among our team.
Uplight provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race (including hair texture and hairstyles), color, religion (including head coverings), age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.