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