NomadDesk

Sr Staff Product Designer

Job Description Summary
The Senior Staff Product Designer is a strategic, hands-on individual-contributor leader who combines deep product and domain expertise with ownership of practices that strengthen the broader Product Design team. Embedded with a product team and partnered closely with Product Management and Engineering, this designer builds durable knowledge of customers, workflows, technology, and business context while shaping product direction and delivering high-quality experiences. Beyond their immediate product area, the Senior Staff Product Designer proactively identifies problems, frames them clearly, determines an appropriate path forward, brings together the people needed to solve them, and leads change through expertise, facilitation, and influence rather than direct people management. They help distribute knowledge and decision-making across the team so designers can own and grow their areas of expertise.

Job Description

Product Strategy and Embedded Partnership

• Build deep expertise in an assigned product domain, including its customers, workflows, business context, technical environment, and evolving needs.

• Partner closely with Product Management and Engineering throughout discovery, product definition, story mapping, prototyping, validation, design, implementation, and continuous learning.

• Translate customer needs, business goals, technical constraints, research, and product evidence into clear requirements.

• Influence product strategy and roadmap decisions through customer understanding, systems thinking, experimentation, and design expertise.

• Lead end-to-end product design within the assigned domain, moving fluidly between problem framing, workflow design, prototyping, validation, detailed interaction design, and implementation partnership.

• Design cohesive experiences across workflows, products, and user roles, applying established design-system patterns and identifying opportunities to improve them.

• Use qualitative research, product analytics, customer feedback, business evidence, and technical input to inform and evaluate design decisions.

• Champion design quality through attention to usability, accessibility, and interaction details, working in partnership with the design-system owner.

• Take ownership of selected Product Design capabilities or team practices in addition to embedded product responsibilities, such as design critique, designer onboarding, research practices, prototyping, design quality, or knowledge sharing.

• Identify recurring problems, capability gaps, or ineffective ways of working; frame the problem, determine the appropriate approach, and lead it toward resolution rather than relying on design leadership to solve it.

• Determine what expertise, stakeholders, evidence, or cross-functional participation is needed to solve a problem and assemble the appropriate group to move it forward.

• Navigates road blocks, ambiguity and organizational complexity constructively, using evidence, facilitation, diplomacy, and sound judgment to reach better outcomes.

• Create and maintain reusable practices, frameworks, tools, guidance, or operating mechanisms that help designers work more effectively and independently, and evolve or simplify them when they are no longer serving their intended purpose.

• Bring design leadership in as an advisor, sponsor, or escalation point when their perspective or authority is materially needed while retaining ownership of the problem and follow-through.

• Take visible leadership in team enablement based on areas of expertise, which may include activities such as design critique, onboarding, workshops, research practices, prototyping, or knowledge sharing.

• Mentor designers through feedback, coaching, shared problem solving, and modeling effective product-design practices.

• Share methods, lessons, and domain or practice expertise so knowledge is not concentrated in a few individuals and other designers can grow their own areas of ownership.

• Develop and share expertise that complements the strengths of other team members and enables others to lead in their own areas.

• Use AI-assisted tools thoughtfully where they improve research, synthesis, ideation, prototyping, evaluation, documentation, or team effectiveness while maintaining human judgment.

• Contribute to or maintain shared AI-enabled tools, agents, prompts, or workflows when they support a designated area of practice, and help ensure they remain useful and current.

• Bachelor's degree in design, human-computer interaction, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• At least 10 years of professional experience in product design, interaction design, or user experience, including complex enterprise or platform-level initiatives.

• A portfolio demonstrating problem framing, interaction design, systems thinking, prototyping, product strategy, and end-to-end product impact, including examples of using and contributing to design systems.

• Experience building deep domain expertise and partnering with Product Management and Engineering throughout the product lifecycle.

• Demonstrated ability to identify ambiguous or systemic problems, frame them clearly, establish a path forward, and lead others toward resolution without formal authority.

• Experience establishing or improving reusable design practices, tools, frameworks, or methods that benefit practitioners beyond an individual product effort.

• Experience mentoring designers and facilitating critique, workshops, or other collaborative design practices.

• Demonstrated ability to influence stakeholders and navigate competing priorities with diplomacy and sound judgment.

• Strong working knowledge of accessibility standards, inclusive design practices, design systems, and the process of turning designs into working software.

• Experience using research, product analytics, customer feedback, and other evidence to evaluate product outcomes and inform design decisions.

• Working knowledge of front-end technologies, including HTML and CSS, with the ability to understand how interface designs translate into implemented experiences.

• Experience using code-based or AI-assisted development environments to build, edit, or refine functional prototypes.

• Experience using or maintaining AI-enabled tools or workflows that improve Product Design effectiveness.

• Experience improving Product Design operating practices within a complex enterprise organization.