Staff/Lead Product Designer

TITLE: Staff/Lead Product Designer

DEPARTMENT: Data

REPORTS TO: Chief Operating Officer / Chief Product Officer

WHO WE ARE:

Thistle’s mission is to help people get and stay healthy while improving the sustainability of our food system. We make nutritious, delicious, ready-to-eat meals, snacks, and juices delivered right to our customers’ doorsteps. We’ve served over 27 million meals to customers all over America, but we’re just getting started. We’re launching in new cities, expanding our menu, and upgrading our user experience to mainstream a new way of eating that can genuinely heal people and our planet - and we need more teammates to join us.

Thistle is headquartered in San Francisco, but our product team is remote. Currently, the team has members in SF, LA, Oregon, Denver, Kansas City, Austin, and Philadelphia, with other Thistle departments spread across the US. You can learn more about life as a remote employee at Thistle here. While this is a remote role, the Staff/Lead Product Designer will be expected to travel 2-4 times a year to visit our production facilities and collaborate with teammates in person.

About the Role

As the Staff/Lead Product Designer, you’ll work with our product and engineering teams, as well as cross-functional partners (such as marketing, customer experience, and internal operations). Reporting directly to the Chief Product Officer, you’ll ensure a consistent, high-quality user experience for both consumers and internal users, while creating repeatable systems and guidelines that help design scale across the organization.

When applying for this role, please provide a link to your portfolio featuring examples of your product design work and thinking. Don’t forget to include any passwords needed to access your portfolio!

How You’ll Make a Difference

• Think holistically about complex systems, empathize with customers, and understand business objectives to create compelling and effective product experiences.
• Develop user-centered design solutions based on research, member insights, and industry best practices.
• Partner with product to help define and execute research initiatives to guide the direction of your design work as well as inform business strategy.
• Present design concepts and clearly communicate design intent through design specs and presentation documents.
• Articulate, negotiate, and refine design requirements in collaboration with product managers and engineers to arrive at the best design solutions.
• Own and iterate on our design system and advocate for scalable design solutions across product, brand, and marketing.
• Collaborate with our marketing team to ensure brand consistency and evolve our brand design system to be even more resonant and differentiating.
• Work cross-functionally with product, data, marketing, engineering, and operations partners to represent the design function, facilitate design discussions, and give feedback in planning and product channels.
• On Day 1, you’ll be the single member of our product design team. But when we expand the size of our product design team, you will:
  • Build and manage our product design team. Hire the best, lead with a well-communicated vision, provide supportive coaching, and guide individuals along deliberate career development paths.
  • You’ll be a player-coach, directly owning and executing projects while also being a people manager.

Qualifications

Who You Are

• 10+ years of relevant experience in user experience design in a product-driven company.
• Demonstrated ability to lead the conception and prototyping of brand new products as well as feature enhancements, all with a user-centered design process.
• You have a user and data-informed design mentality. You are constantly looking to hone your team’s instincts through user feedback and data insights.
• Deep experience conceiving of, planning, and executing user research projects.
• Strong ability to communicate in writing to concisely share insights and effectively lay out a case for a course of action.
• Experience designing for both web and mobile. Familiarity with unique technical and usability constraints when designing for desktop and mobile.
• Experience hiring and directly managing other designers is a plus.

Our Culture

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential values at Thistle. We know we do our best and most impactful work when we feel we are represented and belong. We're proud to actively recruit and hire talented individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences. We do not discriminate against employees or applicants for employment on any legally recognized basis (“protected class”), including, but not limited to, race, ethnicity, citizenship, national origin, color, hairstyles, hair texture, religion or religious creed, age, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, veteran or active military status, marital status, criminal record, genetics, retaliation, sexual harassment or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.