Head of Design

We are looking for an innovative and experienced Head of Design to lead our global design efforts. As finder is looking towards larger notions of comparison across the world, we’re searching for someone to take our creative essence and scale it into a multi-faceted brand, through the product experience and beyond, and deliver on our mission of being the world’s number 1 comparison website.

If building a design team from the ground up and making an immediate impact on a successful and high growth business sounds enticing, then this role could be a good fit for you.

We are looking for a design leader who isn't just a pixel pusher but will add to the conversation and fight for the user. We are looking for a design leader with a strong user experience background as well as hands-on web design experience.
 
Who we are
finder is a comparison site making waves in Australia and around the world. We currently have offices in 5 different countries and constantly expanding. Our goal is to share useful knowledge that helps the world make better decisions. Whether that's teaching people how to save money, get rewards or just comparing product choices. finder.com.au was recognised by Anthill as Australia's Coolest Online Company for 2017 thanks to an amazing team, wonderful users and our innovative product.
 
Achieving our mission of changing the way the world makes decisions requires a diverse mix of creative, passionate and innovative people. We are committed to being an equal opportunities employer and continually striving to create a diverse and inclusive environment where all of our people feel a sense of belonging and bring their authentic selves to work.
 
Each day you come to work at finder, you will be sitting in a comfortable Aeron chair and working at a comfortable workstation in our stunning Sydney CBD office. The kitchen is well stocked with healthy snacks, drinks, fresh fruit and catered lunches are provided daily.

Who are you?
As the Head of Design, you will lead a cross-disciplinary design team, building it into a creative and strategic force for the product team and the company. You will be in charge of leading the design vision, strategy, workflow, and team structure to supercharge product, growth, customer service and other efforts. Reporting to the executive team you will play a key role in delivering on the company mission.

To excel in this role, you must have an excellent understanding of how to scale product design, brand design and design research, while ensuring that our global design team is able to execute quality design in the context of an agile, iterative way of working. You have an innate ability to connect the workflows and output of multiple functions within the organization; you are able to create work that delivers on the warmth of the brand, user experience, visual fidelity, and most importantly, our users’ needs and aspirations.

Above all, versatility is imperative. We’re looking for someone who can work through big picture strategy one minute and roll up their sleeves to optimize production workflows another minute. You have an unwavering passion and enthusiasm for design. You are keen to learn new frameworks, tools, methodologies and innovation within the design field. You are a team player with a positive outlook and strong communication skills. You are enthusiastic about coaching and mentoring fellow team members to raise the bar of all designs delivered.

You feel connected to finder's core values of 'empowering people' to take action, a 'go live' bias towards action, 'be straight up' approach to open communication and 'master your craft' which is all about continuous curiosity and learning.
 
The Head of Design will be expected to:

• Create and articulate an exciting, coherent world-class design vision, philosophy and strategy to give finder a competitive advantage and multiplier towards achieving success.
• Establish the design organisational structure including role definition and optimal headcount to deliver on our business objectives.
• Recruit, manage, train and develop a highly talented and wide spectrum design team into world-class design leaders.
• Build an inspiring and collaborative culture within the design team to help deliver the best possible output from a highly talented team.
• Work closely with the leadership team to understand the product and business needs and architect the team, process, and culture to deliver against these needs.
• Build strong relationships and partnerships cross-functionally, empathising with all stakeholders in the business, helping to support their functions efforts to grow the business.
• Build a sustainable design framework to enable finder’s multi-platform strategy
• Lead product design improvement projects from ideation, wireframing & design through to development, split testing & go live. Collaborating & aligning with all other business-units as part of this process is key to ensure success.
• Solution-driven mindset towards challenges, suggesting and implementing solutions to remove obstacles and prevent constraints from allowing to deliver on project timelines.
• Recruit, manage and integrate external design help (when needed) from freelancers, contractors and agencies.
• Monitor conversion rates and analyse the success of our launches; taking conversion rate optimisation beyond the click, looking at the quality of traffic and final sales numbers attributed to the product design changes
• Set high targets for growth and prioritise the highest business impact activities - We are here to solve user problems, dominate our competitors and grow revenue. Your performance will be measured on reaching and exceeding these targets and the impact to finder's profit your projects deliver.
• Set clear expectations of the design team’s performance, holding team members accountable for delivering on business goals and outcomes they are responsible for.

Experience and Skills

• Extensive Product/UI design leadership experience (preferably 5+ years in management, 10+ years in design roles)
• Strong people management skills at speed and scale.
• Strong leadership, stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Strong understanding of business needs and ability to connect analytical conversations with creative opportunities. Able to speak both languages comfortably.
• Experience in a live environment with an agile, “go live” mode is a big plus.
• Experience working with both internal and external product managers, developers and content teams to deliver results.
• Experience across a suite of digital product design tools (eg: Sketch, InVision, Balsamiq) in order to craft low fidelity sketches to high-fidelity interactive prototypes across websites and web applications on desktop and mobile
• The ability to create all necessary production-ready assets required to launch products and features, as well as working knowledge of implementing designs in Web HTML (responsive) - experience with iOS and Android is a plus.
• Prior UX experience; carrying out user testing, synthesizing results to form design guidelines.
• Designing split tests which prove your ideas and help to implement the results live on the website
• Understanding of technical SEO and how this impacts website design/infrastructure.

How to apply:
If this sounds like the kind of opportunity you've been looking for, select the 'Apply Now' button below to submit your cover letter, resume and showcase your amazing work through a website or portfolio! Use your cover letter to introduce us to you; we want to know who you are, what you've worked on and why you think you'd be a great addition to the finder team


finder is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital or disability status.