Product Designer / Manager

We are:

A tight-knit team of product designers and creative technologists. We use a variety of languages and frameworks to collaborate with startups, nonprofits, corporations, social impact brands, cultural institutions, and more. We often collaborate closely with top-tier international design agencies.

Our modern, bright, open office space is located in New York City, but our team is everywhere. We empower and trust our people, providing ample opportunities for career growth and work frictionlessly across all US time zones.

Product Designer / Manager

Shift Lab is seeking an early-career digital product designer/manager to collaborate closely with our team of project managers and technologists. This role is designed for someone with 3 years of experience translating product and design requirements into actionable and thoughtful recommendations.

You desire to build and ship regularly and have an interest in a product design and management hybrid environment, allowing you to design and manage quality product outcomes closely with development colleagues. You bring an empathetic point of view, a knack for providing strategic guidance, and solid product design skills.

We bring a capable roster of clients, designers, and technologists who value your product and user-centric thinking.

Your day-to-day:

• Collaborate daily with our developers and project managers by providing product/UX guidance that ensures quality delivery for our clients and their customers
• Help our clients and internal teams balance business needs against development timelines while advocating for best-in-class product and UX thinking
• Internalize and synthesize client business goals, user base, and market in order to identify high-value next steps, features, or use cases while balancing timelines and project constraints.
• Evaluate design for improvement or modification based on industry best practice or qualitative/quantitative research in order to facilitate speed to delivery
• Conduct workshops with clients and our team in the name of consensus building and requirement gathering that result in clear actionable design and development solutions
• Apply your own detailed design craft (typography, layout, and composition) in the creation of sitemaps, user flows/journeys, wireframes, high-fidelity UI, and interactive prototypes – while working within client branding or existing design systems
• Collaborate with lead developers and project managers in roadmap and requirement definition based on project timelines
• Collect and reflect requirements via written use cases, user journeys, or design artifacts in order to build consensus and inform roadmap development and story creation
• Evaluate or execute market or design research via competitive analysis, content, and site audits, persona development, or journey mapping
• Craft and facilitate user-centered research including user interviews, usability testing, survey creation and analyses, and testing
• Support the full product lifecycle from discovery to delivery to maintenance
• Assist with refining and improving internal product design, management, and UX processes

Your qualifications:

• 3 years prior work experience in a related role
• A portfolio exhibiting your product/UX design skills
• Working experience with industry-standard design and prototyping tools (e.g. Figma, Sketch, Invision, Adobe)
• Skilled at advocating for the user and demonstrated ability to influence design and development teams using user-centered design methodologies
• Knowledgeable of best-in-class digital trends and patterns for desktop, mobile, and TV
• Clear understanding of best-in-class web, app, and platform development practices
• Strong conceptualization and visual communication abilities
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Experience engaging clients face-to-face with a collaborative spirit and presentable manner
• Self-starting and flexible; with an ability to work independently
• The ability to multitask, managing multiple, simultaneously occurring projects
• Comfort with ambiguity and a commitment to constant iteration and improvement
• Desire to iterate using research and metrics as guidance
• Familiarity working with or creating design systems and tokens is appreciated
• Experience running user research, stakeholder design workshops, and testing is a plus
• Familiarity with Contentful, Shopify Plus, React, Next.js, or Tailwind CSS a plus

About Shift Lab

We are a team of design-minded digital product designers and developers. We solve complex challenges for our clients through the use of creative technology.

At Shift Lab, we craft beautiful, user-driven experiences, connecting the dots between client ambition, conceptual design thinking, and thoughtful code. From extending a creative director’s vision in a digital product to reinventing systems that improve our quality of life, we create innovative user experiences and technical solutions.

We are strongest when we collaborate with creative partners and business leaders who value transparency, iteration, and craft. We’re for those who seek a team of creative, but technical, experimental yet focused; esoteric digital experts who know how to explain things.

Our projects are typically bespoke to the creative or cultural technology challenge at hand. An agile development process keeps us open and responsive to every evolving user need. We’ve kept our headquarters in New York City, but our team is fully remote across all US time zones.

We encourage those from underrepresented communities — women, people of color, LGBTQIA , immigrants, those with disabilities, and people at all the intersections in between — to apply. Even if you don’t think your current skill set checks every box below, but this role seems to align with your strengths, we want to hear from you.