Product Design Director, Marketplace Services

What’s the role?

A double-sided marketplace hinges on key moments of trust for its customers – that crucial moment as customers decide to trust the business and make a purchase or need to reach out for help if something has gone wrong.This role has the opportunity to shape both the buyer and seller experiences for pivotal services such as our purchase flow, payments platform, and keeping our marketplace safe and compliant.

You’ll be a key partner to executives across the company, helping them to see opportunities to better serve our customers and act as a catalyst for collaboration across product groups. You’ll lead a high-performing design team and create paths for them to scale capacity and advance the product experience boldly, by strategically positioning them for partnerships and growth opportunities. 

This role is a full-time position reporting to a Director of Product Design. Etsy offers three different work modes to meet the variety of needs and preferences of our team: Flex mode for candidates who are comfortable traveling to an office location 2+ times per week, Remote mode, and Office-based mode. Learn more about our flexible work modes and vaccination policy here.

What’s product design like at Etsy?

Typically, product designers at Etsy work in a squad with a product manager, 3-7 engineers, researcher and analyst. Together they drive their own part of Etsy, deliver solutions to complicated problems and get feedback directly from customers. Directors oversee a portfolio of opportunity areas, and each area is driven by product managers and squads. 

Day to day, it looks like: 

• Crafting your product group’s strategic roadmap, informed with insights and opportunities, through collaboration with cross-functional peers

• Leading a high-visibility, cross-functional program from a customer perspective, managing relationships and collaboration across product groups 

• Dedicating time to mentor, coach and sponsor managers and skip-level reports

• Facilitating continuous learning and improvements, both of designers' careers and product work through launching experiments and iterating

• Thinking about and improving/documenting processes for your team and the design organization

• Recruiting, hiring and onboarding outstanding design talent 

• Of course, this is just a sample of the kinds of work this role will require! You should assume that your role will encompass other tasks, too, and that your job duties and responsibilities may change from time to time at Etsy's discretion, or otherwise applicable with local law.

Director level at Etsy means:

• You raise the design bar by leveling up design skills across all of Product Design and giving direction to designers within your team

• You have experience using data and research to inform decision making and measuring outcomes

• You can propose new, high-impact product initiatives and align the group around a vision and approach, all while taking into account capabilities and limitations of our product

• You have a track record of leading through ambiguity and collaborating with research, analytics and engineers in a continuous delivery environment

• You embody design quality, understand what success looks like in the ecommerce space and know how to shepherd execution to launch impactful experience change

• You can think at a system level and improve how squads work with our design system

• You regularly make use of your soft skills to persuade and build alignment: listening, consensus-building, decision-making

• You spend time providing leadership and mentorship to managers and recommend new methodologies and approaches for design

• You play a lead role in forecasting, hiring, onboarding, and improving our team’s culture and engagement

Qualities we value in designer leaders:

• Effective articulation of ideas, strategy and design solutions

• Expressing feedback with kindness and candor

• Creation of psychologically safe spaces for idea sharing, coaching and mentorship

• Tolerance for ambiguity and healthy curiosity

• Translation of quantitative & qualitative insights into design decisions

• Contribution to our culture: motivation, optimism, quality, integrity