Product Design Lead - Engagement

#TeamNextdoor

Nextdoor is where you connect to the neighborhoods that matter to you so you can belong. Our purpose is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on.

Neighbors around the world turn to Nextdoor daily to receive trusted information, give and get help, get things done, and build real-world connections with those nearby — neighbors, businesses, and public services. Today, neighbors rely on Nextdoor in more than 305,000 neighborhoods across 11 countries.

Meet Your Future Neighbors

As the Design Lead for Engagement, you’ll be a part of pillar leadership and manage a team of designers focused on ensuring that Nextdoor is an engaging, real-time community for both Neighbors and paying customers. In this role, you’ll specially oversee product design oriented towards customer engagement and deliver high-quality experiences across all platforms to shape the future of the Nextdoor product. You’ll partner with product, research, engineering, data science, and machine learning to drive contributions and the content engagement loop.  

You’re willing to roll up your sleeves to move the work and as excited to shape the strategy and the design vision as you are to get into crafting the details and shipping product. 

You’re mission-oriented, deeply human-centered, and passionate about creating digital experiences that bring people closer in real life. You’re fascinated by neighborhood dynamics and human behavior and excited to design tools that empower neighbors to build stronger communities and transform how people connect and engage with their local area. You’re ever-curious and let new insights change your mind and inspire new solutions. In this role, you’ll help define the Nextdoor product experience and guide your team towards delivering value.

At Nextdoor, we offer a warm and inclusive work environment that embraces a hybrid employment experience, providing a flexible experience for our valued employees.  

The Impact You’ll Make

If you crave a challenge in a fast-paced environment, developing a strong design practice, and take pride in contributing to the growth of a world-class design team, then this is the place for you.  Please include a link to your portfolio in addition to your resume.

Your responsibilities will include: 

• Guide a team of 6-8 product designers, helping them grow in their craft and career
• Envision, design, and ship delightful, user-centered, cross-platform experiences that build the fabric of local communities around the globe
• Be involved in all aspects of the product development for Engagement; from strategy, research, prototyping, concept to interaction design, to final QA and code tweaks right before launch
• Lead cross-functional brainstorms, discussions, design reviews and inspiring design team activities
• Take on challenging problems and turn them into designs that are intuitive, accessible, and user-friendly
• Advance the standard for craft on our team. Ensure design consistency and quality across all platforms and devices as we mature our design system
• Define and create innovative experiences to shape the future of the Nextdoor product as we continue to grow
• Work with partners across design, research, product, engineering, marketing, and brand to maintain consistency of Nextdoor’s product language across all our platforms
• Participate in in-person Nextdoor events, trainings, off-sites, volunteer days, and other team-building exercises
• Build in-person relationships with team members and contribute to the KIND culture that Nextdoor values  

What You’ll Bring To The Team

• 10+ years demonstrated experience shipping great mobile products in an agile environment
• A proven leader across the product development cycle: from strategy and research to synthesis and ideation; from going wide to exploring  many divergent concepts to focusing and honing in on the pixel-level details; from roadmapping to front-end development and implementation
• Exceptional background of both qualitative and quantitative research-driven design
• An excellent communicator and committed partner that’s able to balance business outcomes with team needs and healthy, productive cross-functional relationships 
• A supportive approach to leadership and growing designers’ careers
• A strong visual design sense and typographic skills, and the ability to design within, and help define, visual guidelines
• Fluency with responsive mobile and web design principles and best practices
• Familiarity with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Swift, Java, or Xcode
• Excellent UX, interaction, and visual design skills