Lead Product Designer

The Company

1848 Ventures is a venture studio focused on consistently building, launching, and scaling a portfolio of B2B SaaS companies that harness the power of AI to fuel the future of small and medium sized business.

Backed by Westfield®, a respected leader in commercial insurance, 1848 Ventures extends beyond insurance by launching digital products that address the uncertainties that businesses face on a daily basis. We focus on industries that are the driving force of our economy including construction, real estate, hospitality, retail, and restaurants. Westfield’s backing affords us the agility to explore innovative ideas, weather uncertainties, and pursue ambitious ventures with confidence.

Our talented team of hands-on venture builders, data scientists, engineers, and designers combined with repeatable playbooks allows us to rapidly validate, build, launch, and scale customer focused AI enabled startups.

At 1848 Ventures culture is not just a concept – it is the essence of what we do, our behaviors, rituals, and practices. It’s the actions that enable our set of evolving relationships and the experiences they create. The culture is grounded in the practice of virtues. This enables our pursuit of excellence, which we express and measure by our actions. We act on these behaviors in the “how” of our work, our interactions with others, and the conduct we hold ourselves and others accountable to, individually and collectively.

Read on to discover how your skillset and experiences may help contribute to our approach.

The Opportunity

As a Lead Product Designer within the Venture Loop Team, you'll be at the forefront of our iterative venture-building approach, working across multiple ventures at the earliest stages of our Venture Studio. In this role, you play a pivotal part in the end-to-end research, prototyping, designing, and testing of new ventures. You will collaborate with our new venture leads, data scientists, and engineers to bring innovative ideas to life and create intuitive, user-centric designs that empower SMBs with AI-enabled products.

This role is for an individual contributor seeking a high level of ownership and significant impact across the end-to-end product.

What You'll be Doing

• Conduct customer discovery and user and stakeholder interviews to better understand the problem and inform early designs, prototypes, and product strategy.
• Conduct design research activities, including concept testing, journey mapping, design benchmarking, contextual interviews, personas, generative qualitative research, and more.
• Present research findings and insights in a clear, concise, and compelling manner and ensure impactful findings are incorporated into early product decisions.
• Conceptualize sacrificial designs to facilitate early-stage learning.
• Collaborate with the new ventures lead on product strategy using research-based user insights and guidance, advocating for the user.
• Lead the iterative development of early product designs through storyboarding, wireframes, visual mockups, and varying levels of prototyping.
• Lead conceptualizing and delivering product designs that deliver on the venture's unique value propositions, maximize early learnings, and inform the v1 roadmap for our pre-seed ventures.
• Collaborate with data scientists and engineers to design for AI trust, address constraints, and ensure smooth handoffs.
• Think creatively and outside the box to solve complex problems through your passion for design.
  

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in product design.
• Proven track record envisioning, building, and iterating on digital products.
• Demonstrated experience with end-to-end product design.
• A high level of comfort working in ambiguity.
• Strong portfolio that demonstrates outstanding design skills (prototyping is a must) and product thinking informed by research.
• Experience in a variety of UX research methodologies and tools.
• Expertise with Figma or similar design and prototyping tools.
• Attention to detail and a sense of pride and ownership over the quality of the product.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to communicate design decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Self-motivated, detail-oriented, and comfortable working solo or in small teams in a fast-paced, remote startup environment.
  

Nice To Haves

• Previous B2B SaaS experience.
• Experience with designing for AI products.
  

You might be a great fit if...

• You are passionate about design and early-stage venture work - connecting dots, being 'wrong' more than you're 'right,' getting your hands dirty, and embracing ambiguity.
• You don't attach your worth to an idea or design. The vast majority of early-stage ideas we come up with will fail - we're a team that tests, iterates, and makes the tough calls. If you're prone to falling in love with an early design, you may find our environment challenging.

We are an equal opportunity employer/minority/female/disability/protected veteran.