Lead Product Designer

The short & sweet summary

Knoetic (rhymes with “poetic”!) has built the world’s #1 social network of Chief People Officers, which includes the CPOs of Lyft, Dropbox, Bumble, and 1,000+ more. And we’ve built a people analytics platform used by most of the hyper-growth tech companies of our generation, including Figma, Calm, Discord, Mural, and Benchling.

But what’s really exciting is what’s to come - delivering the grand vision of a people “decision engine” that (a) helps companies make better decisions on compensation, diversity, retention, and more, and (b) helps employees make better decisions about their career.

You have to see it for yourself :)

We’re a rapidly growing $36M Series B company backed with $50MM from legendary investors including EQT, Accel, Menlo, NYT bestselling author Adam Grant, and 100+ founders and executives from companies like Mozilla, Heap, Google, Pinterest, and more. You can read more about Knoetic here - https://www.knoetic.com/careers

Knoetic is hiring a Lead Product Designer who is truly exceptional at their craft. You’ll work closely with our product and engineering teams to shape the strategy, direction, and experience design for our Analytics and CPOHQ product. Together with your team of super-stars, you will execute our highly ambitious vision: to build the world’s #1 platform for top Chief People Officers and their People teams.

If you're a designer that aspires to build products that leave users speechless, finds joy in flawless user flows, and obsesses over pixel perfection - we want to speak with you!

What you'll do

Within your first week, you'll have the opportunity to:

• Get to know the incredible team you’ve just joined! Observe how the values of Knoetic are engrained into the fabric of our culture.
• Learn our past, understand us today, and allow yourself to obsess over our future - you are now a part of it!
• Internalize the Knoetic way.

Within your first month, you'll have the opportunity to:

• Get fully up and running with the product team. You’ll become familiar with our product processes, Agile methodologies, sprint cadence, and how we ship. Work closely with a highly talented team of Engineers and Product Managers to help execute the roadmap.
• Understand our users and their ‘why’. Deeply analyze customers and business problems to identify their pain points. You’ll dive into user discovery and research to unearth new, potential, or existing friction points that can be solved. Inform and maintain user personas and user journeys that support the product teams.
• Deploy your first ship. Discover, design, and ship your first project to production. This is your first of many opportunities to rapidly create impactful and elegant solutions to specific problems.
• Process refinement. You have the freshest eyes on our current processes and systems to deliver value to our users. Question everything and refine processes into repeatable frameworks for success.
• Company onboarding (extended). Go on a listen and learn tour. Build strong relationships with leaders inside and outside of core product teams. Pick their brains on how they define success in their roles. The more aware you are of the different functions, the better Designer and business partner you will be.

Within three months, you'll be fully ramped!

• You contribute directly to the product definition. Partner closely with our Department Leads, Product Managers, and Engineering Leads to shape our strategy and roadmap.
• Operate in a fully autonomous product team. You’ll lead, discover, scope, and test MVPs. You take full cycle ownership of your work from ideation, shaping, review, testing, and presenting feedback in the final prototypes and post-release.
• Design to help your cross-functional teams to create more value with less effort. You set incredibly high standards for UX/UI throughout the design lifecycle. By now, you’d know our component library at the back of your hand and have a strong point of view on the maturity and value of world-class design systems. You use this system effectively to set Engineers up for success and efficiency.
• Actively work toward success, show the math. Partner with Product Managers, Engineers and Department Leads to show outcomes, value, and measurement through both quantitative and qualitative metrics. Map this work back to the larger company strategy and OKRs.

Who you are

Like you, we hold design to a higher standard than others. You design for growth, constantly scaling yourself and those around you. You see your work as part of a larger system throughout the product and organization. As a result, you design your documentation and design files the same way you approach product design—giving the greatest value to the people you work with.

You’re a highly organized, accountable, and emotionally intelligent design leader that has experience working with a high-velocity team in a startup, or equivalent, and can take projects from ideation to implementation. You believe in outcomes over outputs and don’t let great get in the way of good. You’re a strategic coach/player that can operate at different altitudes, understand the big picture, and switch contexts easily. Your portfolio and work demonstrate Design Thinking, problem-solving, facilitation, understanding of constraints, and a refined executional craft. You know how and where to make trade-offs to get in the market to test, learn and put points on the board. 

You consistently deliver and launch high-quality designs that advance our mission of unlocking the potential of every CPO and employee. Your design artifacts provide answers, not gaps—bringing delight to both teammates and end-users. You are a clear thinker, with attention to detail and corner cases. 

Requirements

• 6+ years of hands-on experience in UX and product design
• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent experience.
• Relevant industry experience working within Agile product and engineering teams
• Proven understanding of user research and the techniques required to develop customer empathy and validate concepts
• Proficiency, speed, and execution in Figma, Adobe CC, and prototyping tools like Axure or equivalent. Communicate your designs through sketches, wireframes, high-fidelity comps, and prototypes. 
• Contribute to the growth, maturity, adoption, and hygiene of our design system and provide a governance model and process that can scale
• Communicate ideas and decisions in a concise and engaging way, both in writing and verbally. You simplify complexity for others, motivating and getting teams excited around upcoming goals
• Strong working knowledge of collaborative whiteboard tools like FIGJAM, Miro, Mural or Lucidchart

Preferred Experience

• You have an early-stage start-up experience
• Ability to facilitate and apply Design Thinking techniques to solve customer and business-related problems, a plus
• You have familiarity with data reporting tools such as Mixpanel, or equivalent. You digest and synthesize metrics into new feature initiatives or design updates
• You have direct experience working in B2C/B2B

The key attributes we value in teammates: 

• You like to win. You don’t want a trophy for effort, you want it for first place.
• You’re high IQ, intellectually curious, and intellectually humble. You’re not afraid to say, “I don’t know - but I’ll figure it out, fast.”
• You never say, “that’s not my job” - you take full ownership and responsibility over outcomes. You’re a force of nature that gets the job done no matter what it takes.
• You make everyone else on the team better. Your presence, positivity, and drive inspires others to step up their game. You put the company above your own wants.
• You’re known for your work ethic. You pride yourself on being one of the hardest-working person most people know.
• You’re constantly improving. You know there’s no such thing as perfection, and you’re always pushing yourself (and our company) to be better than you were yesterday.
• You’re just good: You’re honest, principled, smart, open to giving/receiving feedback, and focused on doing right for the company and doing right for the customer

Why Knoetic?

• You want to join an incredibly ambitious team to build the #1 company in this space, without exception.
• You’re looking for an exciting opportunity at a rapidly scaling startup.
• Benefits (full medical/dental/vision insurance, learning budget, WFH stipend, 401k, etc.)
• We’re remote-friendly with a global team!
• Check out our careers page for the full rundown.

Knoetic cultural values

Written by our founder in 2020.

Intellectual curiosity: I want to surround myself with people who are endlessly curious, who are always asking questions, who are fascinated with understanding others and the world around them. We’re the kids who grew up always asking “Why?”

Intellectual humility: I want to work with people who embrace the scientific method, who go into conversations with an open mind and ear, who are looking for ways to sharpen their thinking, who are delighted to find out when they’re wrong rather than invested in defending why they’re right.

Relentless resourcefulness: Our company should be full of people who will run through walls to get to their goals, who will bring more solutions than problems to others, who will figure out a way to succeed no matter what.

Winning: We are ambitious, and we want to win. We don’t want a trophy for effort or for “good enough” - we want it for first place

Positive impact on others: There are people, who by the very virtue of their presence, make everyone else around them a better person. It could be because they have unwaveringly high standards. Or are incredible givers that inspire generosity. Or are teachers of their peers. However they do it, they push others upwards. They are culture accretive; their very presence makes everyone else step up their game.

Speed: We’re a team with a bias for action (paired with good judgment), a desire to get more done faster, because we know it’s the only way we’ll win.

Positivity: You know it when you see it - can-do, optimistic. That doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t have down moments - it just means on balance, you walk away from your interactions with them energized and charged up to do more with your life.

Continuous improvement: We’re always making ourselves better. Stasis is the enemy… if you’re not going forwards, you’re going backwards. Everything is a work-in-progress in perpetuity - yourself included.

Note - even if you don’t check every box in the job description, we still encourage you to apply!

Knoetic is committed to fostering an inclusive workplace, and does not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, protected veteran status, or any legally protected status. If you’re missing a few qualifications or don’t have the exact experience listed above, you may still be the next right candidate for this role or another role we have open at Knoetic!

We look forward to hopefully meeting you soon!