Director of Product Design: Design Systems, Accessibility and Ops

About the position

At Realtor.com, we have among the most comprehensive and accurate coverage of real estate listings and the most engaged users across all the online real estate portals. Our mission is to make buying, selling, renting, and living in homes easier and more rewarding for everyone. Building your career? Build it better at Realtor.com. Join us and help change the world of real estate, one home at a time. Are you a design systems expert? Are you looking to be the driving force in creating world-class experiences that help people find and enjoy a home of their own? If you want to expand your professional goals at Realtor.com, this is the role for you. Join us as our newest Director, Design Systems, Accessibility & Operations and continue to Love Your Career at Realtor.com. This role will partner closely with senior leaders in Product and Engineering to create and execute against our bold vision for transforming the real estate industry. You will be responsible for design decisions and patterns for multiple products and ensuring the adoption thereof by product designers who work in those areas. You'll also build on the design system foundation by enhancing toolchain connections between design files and code, promoting education and advocacy, and collaborating closely with cross-functional teams across all platforms. A team of designers will report to this role, and you will closely partner with a sibling engineering team. You will also collaborate with design leaders on workload assignments, analyze and report on team capacity and skills, and drive the strategy and execution of DesignOps tools and processes to create a more scalable and efficient design practice. This role reports to the VP of Product Design.

Responsibilities

• Design and drive a cohesive and exceptional aesthetic across multiple products within multiple verticals and collaborate across all verticals to ensure consistency.
• Create and uphold a high standard for design excellence and challenge work that does not meet it.
• Clearly communicate design instructions and repeatable patterns to other designers appropriate to their skill level.
• Articulate the value of design, design systems, and accessibility, as well as the reasons for your design decisions clearly in non-designer-speak to Product and Engineering leaders as well as other important stakeholders.
• Give clear and usable design feedback and receive it with professionalism and patience.
• Partner with senior Engineering and Product counterparts to understand their needs and objectives and collaborate on designing solutions that address those most effectively.
• Maintain consistent and accessible tokens in Figma for components built in React, React Native, Swift, and Kotlin.
• Educate the entire design team on the importance and usage of tokens.
• Work with our Brand and Marketing teams to ensure consistency across external-facing assets.
• Maintain and provide icon and illustration libraries for all products.
• Plan a cohesive roadmap with prioritized projects broken out into sprints to align with our engineering team's release pipeline and with our various product release timelines.
• Educate and partner with executives, product partners, and engineering leadership to promote the effectiveness and value of our design systems and paved path initiatives.
• Extend and expand on our culture of design systems and accessibility as a service and partnership while also maintaining boundaries around usage and guidance.
• Build relationships with teams as projects and features become prioritized to keep the roadmap and backlog fresh and prioritized for the highest effectiveness of the systems and processes.
• Partner closely with your Engineering partner to drive alignment and keep code and designs as closely aligned as possible while establishing a path towards a connected toolchain.
• Ensure proper documentation and processes are in place for all design system components, accessible to all stakeholders across platforms.
• Tell the story of design systems and accessibility wins and value by grounding your presentations with business metrics.
• Manage design operations, including understanding and analyzing team capacity, performance, and skills to ensure optimal resource utilization.
• Collaborate with design leaders on team workload and assignments, ensuring coverage during absences or leaves of team members.
• Compile and maintain capacity reports, ensuring the team is effectively utilizing tools like JIRA and Confluence to track progress and manage workflows.
• Manage team tools and infrastructure, supporting design efficiency and collaboration.
• Drive the exploration and adoption of software tools and user-centric design thinking methodologies. Train groups in both.
• Mentor and manage a team of designers, fostering growth and professional development.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience working in the design industry
• 3+ years of working in a product-led organization
• 5+ years of providing design direction and mentoring to junior colleagues in a leadership role
• 3+ years leading a design systems and design operations team
• A strong visual aesthetic and design point of view, exampled in a rich portfolio
• Experience delivering multiple projects simultaneously with cross-disciplined teams
• Experience with capacity planning and workload management
• Knowledge of Figma, JIRA, and project management tools
• Informed and strong opinions, loosely held
• A practitioner of user-centric processes and design thinking principles
• Exemplifies a We, Not Me attitude

Benefits

• Warm, welcoming, and inclusive culture
• Intellectual challenges
• Development opportunities for growth