Group Design Manager

Mark43’s mission is to empower communities and their governments with new technologies that improve the safety and quality of life for all. We build powerful, scalable, and elegant software that sets a new standard for the tools upon which our first responders rely. Our users are diverse, and we are therefore committed to embracing diversity of thought and experience within our team.

We are looking for a Design Group Manager at Mark43 to define the form and functionality of our products and manage a team of designers. You will manage a team that crafts and extends products, systems, workflows, and individual interface details. A key part of this role will be to lead as well as conduct user research and contribute to the product strategy. You will have a leadership role in determining design processes, teaching design thinking to others, collaborating across cross-functional teams, and share information across the company about how people use the things we build. You will manage and mentor designers, inspect their work, and help them grow as you have a player / coach role in the organization. You will lead platform-wide projects from a holistic systems design perspective and collaborate with product, designers, engineers, internal and external stakeholders to create a holistic end-to-end experience. This role reports to the Senior Vice President of Product and will be part of the product and design team within the broader R&D organization.

The Design team works to meet complex business goals and innovate for Public Safety. We design for direct users in law enforcement agencies and indirect users in the communities those agencies serve. We think hard about the potential impact of our software and have a meaningful voice in how the product should (or shouldn't) be built.

What You’ll Do

If you were part of our team, here are some things you would have done last week:

• Shadow dispatchers in their operational environment to observe their usage of an inter-agency messaging system
• Work on designs for a feature that recommends firefighting units to emergency dispatchers based off the nature of the emergency and the proximity and availability of resources
• Collaborate with product & engineering on defining requirements for the replacement of the engine that powers our mapping features for emergency dispatchers and first responders
• Interview dispatch users about their pain points around keyboard shortcuts
• Answer questions from engineers about designs for a bulk unit log-on feature they were implementing
• Attend sprint planning, daily stand-ups, and sprint retrospective meetings for your project team
• Meet with an engineer to review your early designs for various features and determine their feasibility
• Act as manager and mentor to further our designer’s career development
• Meet with the design team to provide each other feedback on work-in-progress
• Meet with the product directors to discuss the roadmap and vision for our product suite
• Met with engineering to validate in a qa or dev environment that what was built meets the requirements and the designs
• Partner closely with product managers to define problem statement, defining deliverables and timelines and securing necessary resources
• Serve as primary point of contact on initiatives, providing day-to-day design leadership
• Host initiative-level sessions, lead design research studies, and lead product experience design workshops
• Make design decisions on initiatives, heavily guided by research findings
• Lead creation and adoption of design and experience patterns
• Manages product design initiatives to ensure overall success, including scope, resourcing and timely quality deliverables that meet stated goals
• Lead and contribute to team values and culture priorities
• Surface growth and development opportunities for self and team members

What You’ll Need

Qualified candidates have experience doing interaction design, working with design systems to delivery polished final designs, and conducting usability testing to refine their work. Relevant experience working across enterprise products and platforms would ensure their ability to thrive.

• You have 7-10+ years of experience doing product design for B2B or B2C products.
• You’ve owned product design at an early stage company.
• You have an outstanding design portfolio demonstrating wider strategic design thinking in your projects and understand modern front-end engineering tools and practices.
• You’re motivated by being a leader. You have previous experience leading teams of product designers. You love mentoring and coaching other designers and are able to maximize the potential of your design team.
• You are great at working in close collaboration with product managers, engineers, customers, marketing, growth, etc.
• You are an excellent cross-functional communicator with the ability to influence multiple stakeholders and customers.
• You are obsessed with product design, have a customer centric approach and you love customer research and delivering great outcomes.
• You have no qualms convincing stakeholders of the efficacy of design principles, advocating design thinking and the value it brings to the business.
• You’ll advocate endlessly for our customers, and have a natural curiosity to understand their needs and will lead customer research.
• You’re an excellent communicator, confident writer, and speaker and can convey the needs of our customers and your vision succinctly and clearly.
• You are ready to roll-up your sleeves to get building and want to see your design in our product.
• You understand how long it takes to get a product design idea into a product and know who to work with and how to get it implemented and are comfortable with overseeing all aspects of a project.
• You have a deep customer understanding and are accountable not only for the look of the product but also its overall success.

The following experience will be prioritized

• Experience creating and refining complex systems through the use of systems design thinking both at a manager and individual contributor level 
• Has designed a scalable platform through robust enterprise configurability
• Worked with and built design system components 
• Worked in a product design organization where designers have verification responsibility
• Experience with pendo or a comparable usage analytics tool 
• Experience with building and refining designs for established products
• Experience with designing for end-to-end experiences from early concepts through design, testing, iteration and delivery
• Able to demonstrate experience designing for enterprise products and/or complex platforms.
• Experience partnering with business owners across disciplines
• Able to collaborate with cross-functional partners in a matrixed organization • Demonstrated ability to present to customers and external audiences
• Ability to partner with engineering counterparts to ensure the execution of the work aligns with the quality of the designs

People who thrive on our team also tend to share the following characteristics:

• Humble, open, and curious. You recognize that no one is perfect and you will often be wrong, and you’re excited about listening and learning being a big part of your job.
• Attentive, active listeners. You’re interested in what others have to say and illustrate your interest with your actions.
• Enthusiastic collaborators. You understand that the best outcomes are achieved through shared ownership, and seek to spread knowledge and expand participation rather than restrict it.
• Comfortable with uncertainty. You know that sometimes problems and situations can’t be simplified or fully understood, and are at ease working within this type of haziness.
• Passionate about personal growth. You view mistakes as opportunities for learning, and want to grow as a designer, colleague, and person.

Our design team is distributed, and this role will require extensive collaboration with designers in multiple US time zones, as well as the UK. You should be an excellent, proactive communicator who is capable of working independently but is also enthusiastic about sharing work and collaborating to solve problems.