Senior/Staff Product Designer (FDA)

About the position

At Skylight, product designers play a critical role in understanding the problem space, identifying opportunities, and developing solutions using a lean-agile approach. Product designers are the primary user advocate on their team and engage in continuous research throughout the product life cycle. Working end-to-end from concept to implementation, product designers conduct research, facilitate design activities, and ensure the product team is building the right thing.

Responsibilities

• Work alongside product managers, engineers, and other practitioners responsible for making critical decisions about product strategy
• Plan and conduct research to inform strategic product and design direction
• Define end-to-end flows that incorporate well-thought-out information architecture, systems thinking, design principles, and common design patterns
• Create simple and elegant user interfaces and/or evolve existing visual systems with clear rationale
• Apply a design process that incorporates frequent iterations and feedback
• Create mockups and design artifacts as needed to help the team develop a shared understanding of the product vision
• Balance user and business needs within an agile working environment
• Uphold human-centered design principles and evangelize its value to stakeholders, engagement partners, and subject matter experts
• Promote empathy for the general public and government workers as we seek to improve their tools and technology

Requirements

• Able to plan, synthesize, and share out generative and evaluative user research to inform product and design direction
• Can define scalable, end-to-end interaction flows that incorporate key design principles, intentional information architectures, common design patterns, and accessibility
• Can create simple, elegant, and thoughtful user interfaces through the implementation of visual design elements, such as branding, illustration, iconography, typography, or microinteractions
• Understand how to use different design processes (e.g., double diamond) and can produce documentation for storytelling that helps your team and stakeholders empathize with users
• Can contribute to product strategy decisions by aligning design processes with lean/agile methodologies, serving as the primary voice for users, prioritizing and balancing user and business decisions, and crafting mental models to help define and refine product opportunities
• Can facilitate and communicate well, including communicating your design rationale to different groups (users, teammates, stakeholders) effectively
• Ability to demonstrate product design leadership through actions such as driving excellence in your team’s design execution
• Able to leverage behavioral analytics tools, such as click maps and heat maps, to gain insights into user interactions with forms and interfaces, informing design decisions and usability improvements
• Design and evaluate multivariant experiments using A/B testing platforms to assess the impact of design choices and optimize user experiences based on data-driven insights

Nice-to-haves

• Prior experience working in the civic tech space
• Experience working in a remote-team environment
• Experience designing, multi-step forms with thoughtful validation patterns and clear error handling to support seamless user input experiences
• Lead and facilitate collaborative workshops to align stakeholders, gather insights, and drive decision-making
• Experience owning design work by leading projects or serving as the sole designer, balancing strategy, execution, and cross-functional collaboration

Benefits

• Medical insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance
• Life and AD&D insurance
• Dependent care FSA, healthcare FSA, health savings account
• Dollar-for-dollar 401(k) match up to 10% of your salary with no vesting period
• Flexible paid time off policy (generally around 25 days per year), plus 11 paid federal holidays
• Up to 12 weeks paid time off for all eligible new birth, adoption, or foster parents
• Performance rewards, including annual salary increase, annual performance bonus, spot bonuses, and stock options
• Business development / sales bonuses
• Referral bonuses
• Annual $2,000 allowance for professional development
• Annual $750 allowance for tech-related purchases
• Annual swag budget of $100 to display your Skylight pride with some merchandise (hoodies, hats, and more)
• Dollar-for-dollar charity donation matching, up to $500 per year
• Access up to $1,000 before payday to cover emergency expenses
• Flexible, remote-friendly work environment
• An environment that empowers you to unleash your superpowers for public good