Principal Product Designer

About the Opportunity

In today's digital-first world, content is the customer experience. As an individual or business, you interact through content, you differentiate using content, and you achieve your goals with content. Content is what powers every single experience throughout our day.

The User Experience team empowers builders to compose awesome content experiences through platform collaboration using a diverse range of products tailored to their needs.

Contentful is a customer-centric platform company that's passionate and opinionated about content management and delivery within digital teams and leveraging the value of content throughout the digital organization. To help us nurture our Design practice, we're seeking an experienced Principal Product Designer.

This position will co-lead strategy and vision work and stear the solution of undefined problem spaces at a product line level. It can be done from our Denver office or remotely in the US. You’ll be the first designer in our Denver hub and play a vital role in establishing the US leg of our product design team.

What to expect?

Alongside product and engineering managers, you’ll support your product line during discovery, solutioning, delivery, and iteration. You’ll support a Sr. Designer in Berlin, as well as have a big impact as we form new product development teams in the US and expand our footprint. We are only scratching the surface of our full potential.

Discovery

• Work closely with leadership team on strategy, visioning, and big-picture work
• Operate proactively and autonomously to establish processes, goals, and scope for small-scale to large-scale projects with your teams
• Partner with UX researchers and data analysts to understand the problem space
• Partner with product managers in identifying and defining the most impactful problems to solve
• Facilitate team workshops and align the team on the context of the opportunities to be ceased

Design 

• Lead design projects in your product line and oversee work across multiple teams
• Connect with other Principal Designers and Senior Managers across Contentful to ensure the seamless integration of user experience across product lines and features
• Oversee large product transformations from end-to-end
• Translate strategy into a structured design process
• Guide contributions to the design system
• Explore new and iterative design solutions that enable content creators to succeed
• Pair with engineers to identify technical solutions
• Hands-on create design archetypes, e.g. customer journeys, system maps, user flows, prototypes, UX copy, etc.
• Plan and conduct user testing

Delivery

• Take a proactive role in ensuring quality of output
• Work closely with product teams to prioritize and efficiently deliver products, features, etc.
• Run experiments and user testing during early release phases

Iteration

• Pair with data engineers and PMs to interpret performance data
• Manage design debt

What you need to be successful?

• 8+  years of relevant experience
• A proactive self-starter, looking for pragmatic solutions and executing autonomously
• Can pull multiple products and features together, integrating them seamlessly
• Comfortable navigating ambiguities with a real drive to find impactful solutions
• Proven ability to create alignment on cross-team product challenges
• Expert-level conceptual skills to design for complex scenarios
• Strong communication skills and confidence in communicating with company leadership
• Proficiency in meeting and workshop facilitation with a deep command of your craft
• Experience working with design systems and top knowledge of interaction patterns 
• Deep experience in running user research and testing from qualitative and quantitative perspectives to inform your solutions

What your first 6 months might look like

First month

• Gain an understanding of Contentful’s product, customers and surrounding ecosystem players
• Listen in on customer interviews to hear first-hand the problems they face
• Shadow designers in different groups to get an overview of their challenges and approaches to solving them
• Start identifying opportunities to improve our customer experience

Months 2-6

• Start owning and leading projects from an operational perspective and with a focus on quality and outcome.
• Visualize the customer journey of planning campaigns, editing and publishing content and an