Senior Manager, Product Design

About Niche

Niche is the leader in school search. Our mission is to make researching and enrolling in schools easy, transparent, and free. With in-depth profiles on every school and college in America, 140 million reviews and ratings, and powerful search tools, we help millions of people find the right school for them. We also help thousands of schools recruit more best-fit students, by highlighting what makes them great and making it easier to visit and apply.

Niche is all about finding where you belong, and that mission inspires how we operate every day. We want Niche to be a place where people truly enjoy working and can thrive professionally.

 

About The Role

Every year, millions of families start the school search process. Students wade through a sea of information and decisions to make, and unfortunately access to help hasn’t changed much in decades: it’s not super clear what your options are, and you might not feel confident that a school is right for you, or think you’ll be able to afford it.

Niche is on a mission to make researching and enrolling in schools easy, transparent, and free. Students need support choosing a school and paying for their education, schools want to find students who will thrive on their campus, and families need help supporting their students every step of the way. Niche helps ensure that it’s not just students in-the-know who get enrolled and can afford to attend.

As a Senior Product Design Manager, you’ll lead our designers that are responsible for student lead generation (Core Business) and partner school success (Shared Platform). You will lead design across a complementary and diverse set of features that power the revenue center of the company: traffic growth, new account creation, school discovery, list building, and how leads are both created and sold. These are critical touchpoints that connect students with schools through Niche, and how Niche helps schools achieve their enrollment goals.

You will be part of a vibrant, rigorous and thoughtful Product Design and Research team, while addressing real problems that affect the earning potential of millions of people. We're looking for someone who can lead through complexity, scale design quality and strategy, and elevate how we work as a team. We are in the early stages of an exciting business transformation, with the opportunity for you to truly make an impact.

 

What You Will Do

• Lead and inspire two teams of product designers working across multiple pods in a fast-paced, high-growth environment
• Shape design strategy both on and off platform, including SEO, lifecycle email, SMS, etc.
• Deeply understand how we package and sell the leads the Core Business pod helps generate, bring internal tools to life with the Shared Platform pod that make our customer-facing teams more effective at generating revenue
• Ensure that our efforts across teams fit together to invent and deliver coherent product experiences, from design system details, to workflows, all the way up to mental models
• Mentor and grow your reports, get hands-on as needed, providing the expertise, direction, and support needed for high performance and major impact
• Establish strong partnerships with Product and Engineering teams, fostering a sense of joint ownership and effective collaboration, and work closely with our partners in GTM
• Contribute to the product strategy and roadmap, working with Engineering and Product partners, and create the design vision for your domain, aligning it with our business strategy, advocating for user outcomes and a world-class user experience
• Bonus if you can travel for in-person collaboration sessions and team building events 2-4 times per year

During the First Month:

• Learn about Niche by meeting with various team members to learn more about our company through our Onboarding meetings
• Meet and get familiar with Product Design and Research, Engineering, Product Management, and GTM partners, understand current practices and collaboration workflows
• Understand the company's business model, how we make money, how student leads are generated and how school partner success is defined and measured
• Get familiar with existing design systems, tools, and processes; conduct initial assessment of design quality standards and team capabilities across the Core Business and Shared Platform pods

Within 3 Months:

• Understand student and school partner user journeys across web, mobile, email, and SMS touchpoints, and how design decisions help drive business impact
• Lead your first major design initiative from strategy to implementation, establishing your design vision and roadmap for both teams
• Beg