Head of Design, Payroll Experiences

Gusto is looking for a Head of Design, Payroll Experiences. This senior Product Design leader will help teams create exceptional experiences for the business owners and admins who use Gusto’s people platform to pay their staff.

About Gusto

Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 200,000 businesses nationwide.

Our mission is to create a world where work empowers a better life, and it starts right here at Gusto. That’s why we’re committed to building a collaborative and inclusive workplace, both physically and virtually. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

As the Head of Design, Payroll Experiences,  you’ll focus on both the holistic customer-facing experience (setting up, running, and managing payroll) and the infrastructure and logic that powers Gusto’s payroll products (by their legal compliance and infrastructure needs). Payroll is Gusto’s core product, and this role will strategically lead their designers to support our mission creating a world where work empowers a better life. 

Gusto’s Design team is made up of a talented group of people from different crafts: Product Design, Content Design, Research, Design Systems Engineering, and Design Ops. To succeed in this role, you’ll need to take an inclusive approach to experience design focused on great UX expressed beautifully, and have skills you’ve honed through practice in growing and leading high performing, customer-needs driven Design teams. You’ll also be part of a senior leadership team alongside key partners in Product Management, Engineering, and Data Science. Read more about Design at Gusto.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Develop a design vision that guides teams to create powerful yet approachable payroll experiences. Help them ship value iteratively towards this north star
• Collaborate with your peers in Product Management, Engineering, Data Science, Product Marketing, and other cross-functional leaders to support your customers and team. 
• Balance forward-looking work and a high bar for quality with a bias towards action and delivering iterative value
• Empower ICs and emerging leaders, and establish a healthy, sustainable culture of excellent work in service of our customers and business
• Support and unblock your team when they need help
• Partner with the research team to influence research questions and direction that will shape Gusto’s product strategy
• Lead workshops and other creative ideation sessions that help teams quickly understand the problem, opportunity, and trade offs, and converge towards ways we might solve customer problems and create value
• Contribute to Gusto’s Design team rituals and culture as a key leader in Design across the company

Here’s what we're looking for:

Craft expertise in UX Design 

• 8+ years of experience in UX Design or a related practice with a portfolio of work you’ve contributed to directly. At least 3 of those years have been in a role where you’ve managed people 
• Ability to speak about quality in tangible, grounded terms. You know how to use insights — data, research, and business metrics — to drive informed decision making
• Understanding of how UX, visual design, content, research, and front-end development contribute to creating holistic, easy-to-use experiences with tried and tested approaches to get the most value from these practices

Design strategy and vision 

• Experience working with cross-functional peers to identify high impact opportunities and execute on them. You are comfortable with debate and making tough decisions to unblock teams 
• Demonstrated experience balancing priorities and making appropriate tradeoffs to best serve our customers and business. Able to speak to difficult decisions made on previous projects
• Experience taking a practical and pragmatic approach to defining vision collaboratively and at the right fidelity — and then translating it into actionable next steps

Leadership acumen with proven practices to set people up for success 

• You know when to be direct, when to inspire, and when to get out of the way. You’re great at coaching people towards delivering wo