Lead Product Designer, Operate

📋 Description

• • As a Lead Product Designer on the Operate team at Highlightta Inc., supporting Zipline, you will be instrumental in shaping the future of frontline work. Zipline is a rapidly growing SaaS company dedicated to transforming how frontline teams operate, empowering leading brands across diverse industries like retail, healthcare, and logistics to enhance employee connection, alignment, and inspiration. The Operate pillar is the core engine of Zipline's platform, designed to tackle the complexities faced by frontline workers who juggle numerous tasks, compliance mandates, and constant communication, often under significant time pressure and on limited screen real estate. This role offers a unique opportunity to own the design strategy for intricate, multi-phase initiatives and define the user experience direction for a substantial product surface.
• • You will act as a sought-after design expert, proactively identifying challenges and driving innovative solutions. Your role will involve shaping product direction through a deep understanding of user needs, fostering alignment among diverse stakeholders, and elevating the overall design craft within the team. This position requires a balance between hands-on individual contribution and leadership in design critique, mentoring senior designers, and influencing product strategy and roadmap as a key cross-functional partner.
• • **Craft & Execution:**
• • Take full ownership of the design strategy and execution for the Operate pillar, encompassing complex, multi-quarter initiatives focused on task management, compliance workflows, and operational communication.
• • Develop elegant and intuitive solutions for intricate, multi-step workflows, creating novel patterns and interaction paradigms when existing solutions are insufficient.
• • Make substantial contributions to the strategy and ongoing evolution of the design system, identifying opportunities to introduce new, reusable platform patterns.
• • Consistently deliver work of exceptional polish, creating interfaces that simplify complexity without compromising depth or functionality.
• • Adapt prototype fidelity to suit specific situational needs, leveraging prototypes not only for handoff but also to inspire, validate concepts, and build consensus.
• • **Strategy & Customer Focus:**
• • Collaboratively define design strategy with cross-functional partners, actively shaping problem definitions and approaches, not merely executing pre-defined tasks.
• • Proactively identify new problems and opportunities for the team to address, and establish clear success metrics for major initiatives.
• • Plan, conduct, and synthesize both qualitative and quantitative research to gain a profound understanding of user motivations and business objectives.
• • Act as a strong advocate for the user perspective across the product area, influencing cross-team priorities based on research findings and user insights.
• • Apply design thinking principles to roadmap discussions, assisting the team in making more informed and effective trade-off decisions.
• • **Leadership & Collaboration:**
• • Build consensus around design decisions across multiple teams and stakeholders, particularly in ambiguous or high-stakes situations.
• • Lead design critiques, providing high-quality, actionable feedback that measurably improves the team's output and design quality.
• • Mentor and coach senior designers, supporting their skill development and guiding them through complex challenges.
• • Communicate the design vision and rationale persuasively to leadership, facilitating productive discussions that enhance design credibility throughout the organization.
• • Partner closely with Engineering teams to ensure technical feasibility and optimize implementation strategies, while also identifying design opportunities that drive significant business value.
• • This role is crucial for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of frontline teams by providing them with clear, actionable tools and workflows. You will be at the forefront of designing solutions that directly impact the daily operations of thousands of users, simplifying their work and improving business outcomes. Your work will contribute to Zipline's mission of empowering frontline employees and driving operational excellence for their clients.