Head of Product Design

About Rewiring America

Rewiring America is the leading electrification nonprofit, focused on electrifying our homes, businesses, and communities. We develop accessible, actionable data and tools, and build coalitions and partnerships to make going electric easier for households and communities. Rewiring America helps Americans save money, tackle nationwide emissions goals, improve health, and build the next generation of the clean energy workforce. We believe in an abundant, flourishing, climate-safe future, and know that, together, we can realize one.

Position Summary

We are hiring a leader, team builder, and design champion to be Rewiring America’s first Head of Product Design. In this newly minted position, you will lead the design team responsible for Rewiring America’s software products and adjacent non-software experiences. These products and experiences help homeowners and renters overcome the key barriers to converting their household’s heating, cooling, water heating, cooking, driving, and clothes-drying to electricity from fossil fuel energy. Our north star as an organization is to accelerate the pace of electrification needed to meet our climate goals, and to do so equitably by bringing these home upgrades to historically underserved communities. However, we can not achieve this scale of change if we don’t center the household, understand their needs, and build delightful products and experiences for them. That is your primary mandate. To do so, you will build a strong team and practices, make the vision tangible, and champion design methods and design thinking across the organization. This role reports to the VP of Product.

Requirements

What You’ll Do

As the leader of the Product Design team (currently 2 product designers, 1 product & experience designer, and a UX researcher to be hired), your first responsibility will be to build a strong design team and design practice. You will be responsible for coaching, hiring, and developing designers, as well as creating team rituals and practices that build a community of practice. You will be responsible for defining our design process, which should be simple but ensure the quality of the end product. You will prioritize work on systems, such as our design system or design principles, as a mechanism to help the team scale more efficiently.

You will also be responsible for the design of our products. You will help define the north star vision of the product and will help flesh out our product strategy into something visual that the organization can rally around. You will be a peer to the leaders of Product, Engineering, and Data Science in defining the priorities and roadmap. You will rely on your team for day-to-day design work and decisions, but you may occasionally scrub in on strategic initiatives to do hands-on research, prototyping, or other early stage design work.

Finally, you will collaborate across the organization and bring design as a lens for better collaboration and decision-making. We are building a different kind of non-profit that is ambitious and cross-functional in nature, and the Head of Product Design will help unlock that potential by championing and implementing design practices with leaders in other parts of the organization, such as the Communities, Policy, or Market Development teams. You will be a constant champion for the user and user-centric thinking. You will also work very closely with our Brand Design and Creative teams, who will be key partners in implementing the visual and UI design across digital products and other experiences.

You will:

• Build a strong design team from a small group of strong individual contributors. Identify and fill gaps with new hires.
• Collaborate with the design team to develop replicable design systems and processes
• Be a great manager. Coach, empower and grow the team. Build a design career ladder and invest in helping individual designers grow their skills.
• Understand and champion our users. Ensure that decisions are grounded in user needs. Initiate the research needed to gather user insights.
• Collaborate and build relationships across the organization, especially with the Brand Design and Creative teams where there will be deep collaboration on projects.
• Introduce the rest of Rewiring America (outside of the technology teams) to design thinking and design practices and find high-leverage opportunities to collaborate with them.
• Create a tangible representation of the product vision through artifacts.
• Build a strong design brand for Rewiring America through external communications (social media, conferences) and publicizing our work.

Who You Are

As the incoming Head of Product Design, you will be driven by a commitment to Rewiring America’s values, vision, and mission. You have a track record of building successful products, teams, and design-driven organizations in your career. And you’ve built some of those from scratch. You have been a leader in at least a couple of different contexts, from product companies to design agencies to non-profits. You have experience that spans disciplines, including a background in UX/UI design, but also research, visual or brand design, service design, and/or creative strategy. This gives you the range to operate well in a highly cross-functional organization like Rewiring America.

You trust and empower your team, but you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty when needed, and you can operate well both at the strategic level and down in the weeds. You are always humble, curious, and eager to learn. You stay close to research and discovery work, so that you can understand our users and their needs, and you always bring conversations and decisions back to the user and their “why.” You are an experienced coach of designers, and you are a clear and persuasive communicator. You have an eye for good design, but more importantly, you know how to foster quality in a team environment with clear standards and principles.

Candidates will also possess the following Core and Preferred qualifications and characteristics:

Core

• Strong commitment to the mission, policies, and goals of Rewiring America
• 10+ years experience as a designer, with experience in software product design at a minimum, but ideally experience in diverse domains such as research, service design, visual design or creative strategy
• 3+ years experience as a design leader and people manager, with a strong track record of coaching and developing design talent
• Experience successfully recruiting, managing, and retaining a fully remote team
• Track record of being able to engage in both product strategy and design details, and willingness to scrub in where needed
• Creator and builder of new products, teams, or processes in the past
• Track record of strong and effective collaboration with cross-functional partners in Engineering, Product, Data Science, Marketing, and others
• Relentless user-focused mindset with a strong design process toolkit
• Strong communicator and storyteller across multiple mediums, with skill in delivering information in a concise and compelling manner, including to leadership audiences and colleagues from diverse backgrounds in software, energy, policy, and community advocacy
• Demonstrated positive impact on the overall team health and productivity
• Comfort with ambiguity, but also a demonstrated ability to dig in when needed to create clarity and unblock situations.

Preferred

• Content knowledge or experience in energy, building electrification, residential real estate, construction, home improvement or other domains with connection to residential buildings
• Experience with products that extend into the real world
• Experience running a design system across a product suite from specification to technical implementation

Commitment to Racial Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

Rewiring America values diversity in all its forms and is committed to inclusive and transparent recruitment, hiring and promotion processes. Candidates of diverse backgrounds and lived experience are strongly encouraged to apply.

Hiring Statement

Rewiring America, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) public charity that incubates new and innovative public-interest projects and grant-making programs. Rewiring America is safe and open to all employees and partners, respecting the full spectrum of race, color, religious creed, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, political affiliation, ancestry, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status and all other classifications protected by law in the locality and/or state in which you are working.

Benefits

Compensation and Benefits

$200,000-$250,000 commensurate with qualifications and experience.

Comprehensive benefits package that includes 100% employer-paid health, dental, and vision insurance for employees (and their families). Employees are able to enroll in 401k retirement plan and are eligible for a 3% automatic contribution and up to a 3% employer match on 401k contributions. Employees are also eligible for pre-tax transportation benefits. Employees will receive 160 hours of vacation time, 80 hours of health leave, up to 2 days of casual leave, and 20 hours of volunteer leave annually. Employees will also receive 11 paid holidays throughout the calendar year (13 days during Presidential and Congressional elections). We have an office closure between Christmas and New Year. Employees are eligible for 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave after 90 days of employment. Regular, full-time employees and part-time employees are eligible to take up to sixteen weeks of parental leave, in all cases related to birth, adoption, or foster care starting from the first day of employment. We offer access to professional development resources.

Application Procedure 

To apply or nominate a candidate, please submit an application and resume via the Rewiring America page at Workable.This position is open until filled, and we are moving quickly to fill this position -- apply as soon as possible. Candidate review and phone screens begin immediately and will be conducted throughout the search period.

E-Verify 

Rewiring America, Inc.  participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with employees’ Form I-9 information to confirm authorization to work in the United States. Job candidates and employees authorized to work may not be discriminated against on the basis of national origin or citizenship status.