Lead Product Designer

$210,200 - $231,200/Yr

Xero - San Mateo, CA

Full-time - Senior

San Mateo, CA

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

About the position

The Lead Product Designer at Xero is responsible for defining, designing, and delivering seamless product experiences within a designated product area. This role involves leading design tasks, mentoring team members, and collaborating with various stakeholders to enhance the design vision and execution. The Lead Product Designer plays a crucial role in promoting design collaboration, maintaining industry knowledge, and ensuring high-quality design outputs that align with business strategies and customer needs.

Responsibilities

• Promote collaborative design opportunities between designers to increase capability and robust design thinking
• Maintain an up to date knowledge of trends within the product and design industries
• Work closely with designers in your portfolio or initiative to mentor, build capability and ensure quality is achieved consistently across the product
• Assist and mentor team members in their development, identifying opportunities for them to grow and achieve their goals
• Partner with the Product Design Director(s) and Principal or Lead Designer(s) in your product area to lead projects and mentor designers
• Work with design leadership within your portfolio to understand the Product Design vision and direction
• Help drive consistency and quality of execution within your product area to deliver beautiful, enabling, and meaningful experiences which solve the customer problem and align to business strategy
• Collaborate with peers across Product, Technology, Product Marketing and other functions to inform strategies and objectives, scope road maps, agree priorities and plan work programs
• Contribute to Product visions, along with plans for evolutionary, iterative updates
• Collaborate with designers across other product areas to understand connections and opportunities to learn & leverage each other's work
• Collaborate with design leadership to introduce new technologies, techniques and design tools to improve performance and process
• Produce and share prototypes, concepts showing how a user will experience your solution
• Scale and evolve solutions to critical customer problems across multiple teams and areas of the business
• Partner closely with researchers or lead studies to understand customer needs and advocate to solve the right customer problems
• Conduct desk research including domain and competitor analysis, interaction/design trends and 'best of' examples
• Create frameworks such as wireframes low/high-fi, visual frameworks, content/data models etc.
• Develop phased design solutions that bridge the gap between a future state and current patterns
• Design for accessible inclusive experiences that meet or exceed best practice and all internal standards
• Present and communicate design work to a range of different audiences
• Create effective handover materials which clearly communicate how the design should look and behave throughout interaction flows and journeys
• Participate or where necessary conduct generative user research to understand customer underlying goals, needs, behaviors and pain points
• Influence, challenge and support designers within your product area to deliver high quality product experience
• Facilitate cross functional team workshops to bring everyone together at key points in the process and around key decisions
• Partner with development teams during sprints to provide design QA and problem solve issues as they arise

Requirements

• Proven experience in product design with a strong portfolio showcasing design work
• Excellent understanding of design principles, user-centered design, and usability best practices
• Strong communication and collaboration skills to work effectively with cross-functional teams
• Experience mentoring and guiding junior designers
• Ability to conduct user research and synthesize findings into actionable design improvements
• Proficiency in design tools such as Sketch, Figma, or Adobe Creative Suite
• Knowledge of accessibility standards and inclusive design practices

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with design systems and pattern libraries
• Familiarity with front-end development technologies
• Experience in leading design workshops and collaborative sessions
• Understanding of business strategy and product management

Benefits

• Generous paid leave
• Paid leave for physical and mental wellbeing
• Employee Assistance Program for mental health care
• Medical, dental, vision, and disability insurance
• Fertility and family forming financial support
• 401k contribution matching
• 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers
• Employee Share Plan
• Flexible working arrangements
• Career development opportunities