The position involves managing a 30-person group of product designers and user-experience researchers, primarily in Seattle but also in San Francisco. Since many of these folks are all-stars, it’ll be important for you to be a leader people want to work for, developing individual contributors to higher and higher levels of performance and managers to take on more and more responsibility.
This role reports to Redfin’s Chief Product Officer. You’ll frequently be in the room with the CEO, bringing a world-class design perspective and a founder’s mentality to decisions that impact the entire company. The scope of our software is what makes the role so exciting: you’ll be responsible for the design of our cult-status listing-search site and mobile applications, which drive Redfin’s growth, and for massive systems built from scratch to make us more efficient: for customer relationship management, loan origination, on-demand staffing, and automation.
You’ll need to be an expert in the craft of design, one who doesn’t blink at diving in to take a thorny design challenge and invent a solution that’s incredibly fluid for users. You’ll need to be a leader who can hire, inspire, and coach both managers and individual contributors, and can set up an org structure that maximizes their efficiency. Most of all, you’ll need to insist on greatness in every single pixel of the designs that your organization creates.
Key Attributes
Leader of artists: great designers bring imagination and craftsmanship, and they are artists much more than technicians. You’ll need to foster a community among these artists and set them up to do groundbreaking work. You’ll be the ultimate arbiter of the designs we code and ship, and you’ll need to hold an insanely high bar for these designs and use that to inspire the team.
Artist and businessperson: you’ll need to marry artistry with good business judgment, and be an expert at rationalizing great design with other company needs. To do this you’ll need to be creative at both bringing data around design ideas as well as making strong logical arguments for core design principles.
Big thinker: design and user research has a unique position in seeing across all of how people use the software that Redfin builds. You’ll need to take this and use it to think big about what we should be doing that we’re not already, and to carry this thinking into Redfin’s overall strategy-setting process.
Leaper and grinder: design sits at the front of the product development lifecycle, so the speed with which your organization moves will set the pace for everyone else. You’ll need to bring a relentless drive for speed, and a talent for identifying ways to simplify and move faster while achieving our design needs.
Consumer and enterprise design: we design our website and mobile applications so that consumers love them and find joy in using them; speed and experimentation are key tools here. At the same time, we design our software for field staff in a way that allows them to be more productive at the work they do to earn a living; understanding their core (and sometimes diverse) needs and minimizing churn for them is key. You’ll need to be able to lead teams to do both of these well.
A Cultural Leader
As with any leadership role, your first responsibility is for the culture of your own organization, hiring talented people and creating a shared passion for beautiful, functional software. But you’ll also have to connect with real estate agents, transaction coordinators, mortgage advisers and other Redfin employees from all walks of life, as colleagues and collaborators, not just users.
Our goal isn’t just to ship pretty software, but to make real estate fundamentally more efficient and housing more affordable. You’ll have to learn from our real estate and lending experts, which requires empathy and humility. We believe that employing agents and designers, lenders and product managers all under one roof is a more humane and sustainable model than the marketplaces that depend entirely on independent contractors, but that means our leaders have to be down-to-earth and nitty-gritty.
So you’ll have to be savvy about the way people actually use software, not the way a designer wanted them to use it. You’ll have to work with program managers who design the processes for deciding which agent hosts a home tour, or how we divvy up the labor to prepare the closing paperwork. And you’ll have to be frugal. Some design decisions change everything for users, and some don’t make much difference at all, and figuring out which is which before we build it is important since, at Redfin, all of that software is paid for by the sweat of a real agent’s brow.
You’ll be a role model at a mission-driven company that has long been defined by the passion of our people. You’ll be joining a team of leaders who work hard to help one another out, and who enjoy each other’s company. We’re excited to be bringing someone new onboard. It should be a lot of fun!
Requirements
Redfin is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to hiring a diverse workforce.
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