Director, Product Design - Shops (NY or Remote US)

Company: Slice
Location: Kansas City
Posted on: January 15, 2022

Job Description:

Pizza is at the heart of our communities. From birthday parties to gameday potlucks, life's special moments are bettered by the craftsmanship and tradition found behind local pizzerias' counters. We're here to make sure these iconic small businesses serve our communities for generations to come by giving them the digital tools and services commonly found at big chains. Can you imagine what a small mom and pop pizza shop could achieve with the resources of Domino's?

Slice is looking for a Director of Product Design to lead vision, strategy, and design direction and support the team of designers working on its portfolio of shop-facing products. This encompasses multiple large products that are key to Slice's mission and business, including our owner's management portal, order review system, and point-of-sale software, as well as several other exciting products that have yet to be announced.

Reporting to our VP of Product Design, you'll be a key member of our design and product leadership team, responsible for building deep partnerships across the organization, understanding the needs of different stakeholder groups, and establishing scalable internal frameworks to drive high-quality design execution, customer and business impact, and team culture at scale.

What You'll Do
Define and communicate vision and strategy. Work with cross-functional partners and your team members to develop and align around an inspirational long-term vision for our portfolio of shop-facing products and define a strategy for each product that supports that vision.
Facilitate planning and prioritization. Facilitate the prioritization of problems and opportunities we tackle to help your team members focus and ensure that their work is aligned with the overarching product and company strategy.
Set your team up for success. Implement (and improve) tools and practices and create operational space to help your team members do their best work.
Break down and frame problems. Help your team members to break down, understand, and clearly define complex problems at the outset of each project.
Provide design direction and feedback. Provide clear and actionable direction and feedback to our designers that improves the quality of their work, supports the customer and business outcomes that they're responsible for, and helps them to grow professionally.
Establish and uphold a high bar for design quality. Communicate clear standards for design quality that ensure our products are simple, intuitive, lovable, and cohesive and stand for those quality standards when products aren't ready to ship.
Define and guide a high-level design process. Define a high-level design process that can be adapted to the unique needs of each project, but ensures that problems and solution parameters are clearly defined upfront, makes space for divergent exploration, and solicits input from key partners.
Collaborate and facilitate alignment with cross-functional partners. Build closing working relationships with cross-functional partners and work together to define, prioritize, and manage work, ensuring that design processes, goals, and vision are accounted for.
Coach and mentor designers. Provide regular, structured guidance and feedback that helps our designers grow their technical skills, collaborate more effectively, and achieve their career goals.
Attract and hire talented designers who will level up our team and our products. Actively source, recruit, and hire the best of the best. (We mean this.)
Foster a work environment and team culture that elevates performance and morale. Enable and maintain a healthy, thriving team culture that promotes inclusivity, collaboration, curiosity, growth, and optimism.
Advocate for design. Advocate and educate on behalf of our design team, elevating others' understanding of design and helping them to recognize its value in driving new strategic thinking, innovation, and stronger customer and business outcomes.

What We're Looking For
5+ years of experience managing and coaching product designers. You have at least 5 years of experience managing the performance and development of product designers.
A track record of creating high-quality, impactful products. You've demonstrated sound attention to detail and craft, as well as an ability to produce strong customer and business outcomes.
Customer-focused and business-minded. You strive to understand and serve customers' needs in a way that simultaneously furthers the business' short- and long-term objectives.
Visual design taste and expertise. You have a well-developed aesthetic sense and taste, but you also understand that visual design is about much more than aesthetics and recognize how to leverage visual design to improve usability and draw attention.
Systems thinking. You're able to think beyond pixels and manage and weave the complexity of different offerings, understanding how each affects the others and contributes to the bigger picture.
Product judgment. You have strong product instincts and intuition.
Structured thinking. Rather than solving problems in isolation, you develop frameworks that help others to understand and solve sometimes-ambiguous problems.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills. Your communication is clear, direct, and personable, you provide thoughtful rationale for your decisions, and you're comfortable and effective speaking in front of groups of all sizes.
Strong collaboration and relationship-building. You're effective at working across organizational boundaries, building trust and alignment with team members and peers, and persuading when necessary.
Organization and time management. You have strong organizational skills and attention to detail, with the ability to prioritize and manage multiple high-visibility initiatives simultaneously.
Open-mindedness. Even when you have a strong conviction in your point of view, you invite and consider others' perspectives and ideas.
Adaptability. You work in a flexible and empathetic way, understanding that each team and individual contributor will have unique work styles, and each project will vary in its specific process needs.
Decisiveness. When faced with a wide variety of inputs (quantitative and qualitative data, strategies, principles, opinions, etc.), you quickly process the information available to you and make a decision on how to best move forward.
Passion for supporting teams and empowering designers to do their best work. You strike a balance between challenging and nurturing your reports, delivering constructive feedback with kindness and candor, while ensuring that your team members are fulfilled and moving forward in their careers.
Motivating. You enjoy learning what makes your team members' hearts beat and inspiring them to do their best work.
Design advocacy. You represent your team effectively, substantiating their work and the reasoning behind their decisions and advocating for the role and value of design.

The Best Parts Of This Job
Work that matters. All of your work at Slice will be focused on helping hard-working entrepreneurs behind small, independent businesses to succeed and better serve their local communities.
Ownership and impact. You'll have true ownership of a large area of work and be in a position to make a huge impact for both our customers and the business.
Transformation. You'll be provided the opportunity to rethink and redesign the products that exist today in order to significantly level up the design and help them achieve their potential.
Design quality. We're committed to creating best-in-class product experiences and ensuring that all of our designers are put in a position to do the best work of their career.
Amazing teammates. You'll be surrounded by smart, kind people that you'll learn from and enjoy working with on a daily basis.
Company culture. There are many great aspects of Slice's culture, but our most special quality is the genuine openness to and willingness to try out new ideas.
Your dream workspace. To show our commitment to best-in-class design, we set up all of our in-office designers with an Apple Pro Display XDR monitor and whatever else you need to do your best work.
Career growth. Our business is doing extremely well and growing quickly, which has created a vibrant environment and ample opportunities for learning and career growth. As we continue to grow, so will you.
FREE PIZZA! Last, but definitely not least, all employees get a weekly pizza stipend in addition to free pizza served at our offices.

About Slice

Slice powers independent pizzerias with the specialized technology, data insights, and shared services they need to serve today's digital-minded customers. This united network of pizzerias enables these small businesses to thrive against major corporate chains and form the nation's largest marketplace for authentic pizza. Slice makes it easy for customers to order from their go-to shops and discover their next favorite.

Serial tech entrepreneur Ilir Sela started Slice to solve the digital challenges his family's New York City pizzerias faced. Today, the Slice team has grown to over 700+ across 5 offices globally. If you're ambitious, interested in growing your career, and hungry to join one of the fastest growing companies in tech, we may have a role for you. Check out a few awards we've recently won for our workplace and culture: Inc., Crain's, BuiltinNYC

Slice is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to building an inclusive environment for people of all backgrounds and everyone is encouraged to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, disability, national origin, protected veteran status, age, or any other status protected by applicable national, federal, state, or local law.

Keywords: Slice, Kansas City , Director, Product Design - Shops (NY or Remote US), Executive , Kansas City, Kansas