Lead Product Designer, Elections

Change.org is searching for a Lead Product Designer to accelerate the development of a new set of local election experiences and tools as we venture to bring functional prototypes to real users throughout the 2025 local election cycle. With a masterful understanding of, and passion for human-centered design you will lead all aspects of user experience, validation and testing for our product concepts en route to developing a scaled product in 2026 and beyond. 

The successful functioning of democracy relies on informed citizens, yet many voters lack the information they need to make educated decisions in local elections, leaving them to vote uninformed or abstain from voting altogether. Over the next 6-9 months we endeavor to answer the following questions:

• How might we educate voters with a best-in-class mobile-first voting experience?
• How might we build tools for supervoters & endorsers to help inform fellow citizens?
• How might we engage candidates to interact with their potential constituents?

Key Outcomes:

• Accelerate the research, design and validation of elections products & features through rapid functional prototyping & experimentation.
• Concept, design and iterate the user experience, enabling us to mature the product prior to breaking ground in code, accelerating development.
• Optimize our learning across a schedule of local elections, testing riskiest assumptions, validating the product skeleton and identify the right experience(s) that will meet our users ‘where they are’.
• Collaborate with product, product marketing and engineering leads to shape strategy and drive an effective product development process.
• Use our design system and guidelines, to create new features from ideas on paper to implementation.
• Shape the make-up and ultimately the culture of this new team as we hire and onboard engineering and product marketing partners.
• Reduce complexity to create simple, delightful, accessible experiences for our users.

The most important skills and capabilities for the role are: 

• UX Research - Skilled at using evaluative and generative research methods to get to the heart of customer problems.
• UX Design - Has a strong creative vision and the ability to switch easily from blue sky ideation to generating fully fleshed UX designs.
• Functional Prototyping - Expertise in collaborating with engineering to build functional prototypes that accelerate time-to-market through rapid validation and iteration. This includes:
• Static Functional Prototypes: Developing clickable prototypes (e.g., Figma) that incorporate dynamic, user-specific content, such as ballot information (races, candidates, measures, etc.), enabling stakeholders to explore user flows and interact with realistic data and recommendations.
• Live Functional Prototypes: Partnering with engineering to create prototypes integrated with live data, enabling broader and more efficient testing to capture scaled feedback in real election moments.
• Leadership & Drive - Intrinsically motivated by driving impact and outcomes with a bias to action and challenger mindset.
• 0-1 Idea to Execution - a track record of validating, launching and maturing products to deliver sustained impact for customers and businesses.

Target experience:

• 8+ years of UX design experience.
• 3+ years experience designing for a consumer product.
• Material experience with functional prototyping & experimentation.
• Experience with or interest designing AI-powered products.
• Bonus: experience in B2C civic tech, edtech or media & publishing.
• Bonus: experience designing product-led growth features.

Interested? Great! Here's what you should know:

This is a full time role based in the United States or Canada. We’re currently able to hire staff based in the following US locations: AK, AZ, CA, CT, DC, FL, GA, IA, IL, KS, MA, MD, MO, NC, NJ, NV, NY, OR, PA, RI, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI and the following Canada provinces: BC, ON, AB.

Our compensation philosophy is based on pay equity. All of our salaries are determined before we launch a role – they are based on a predetermined salary scale, the level on that scale and the cost of labor for that location. The annual salary of a Lead Product Designer is $218,000 USD in San Francisco/New York, is $207,000 USD in Austin, Boston, LA and Seattle, is $185,500 USD in all other US locations, is $204,500 CAD in Toronto/Vancouver, is $189,500 CAD in Victoria/Calgary and is $187,000 CAD in all other Canada locations. 

Benefits and perks also vary based on location. 

Our evaluation process is as follows:

• Recruiter Screen
• Take Home Exercise
• Virtual Team Interviews with our GM Elections, CPO, and VP Design, Head of Talent, Head of Engagement, and a Design team member

We know the confidence gap and imposter syndrome can get in the way of meeting amazing candidates like you, so please don’t hesitate to apply—we’d love to meet you. We also know it’s rare for someone to meet 100% of the qualifications. Please apply anyway!

We actively encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds and perspectives to apply. At Change.org, we are dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We invest in programs to support our diverse workforce, offer inclusive onboarding experiences and affinity groups, celebrate the heritage of our staff, provide training on working across differences, and maintain fair and transparent salary scales. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, or culture.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for candidates with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.

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