Senior Product Designer

Job Description

Who are we?

Sidewalk Labs is an urban innovation company that tackles cities' greatest challenges. We create products and solutions, invest in new companies, and help developers build more sustainable, innovative, and equitable places around the world. Our ambitious vision requires us to push ourselves beyond conventional thinking, and we work hard in pursuit of our mission. Our cross-disciplinary team consists of experts from real estate, urban planning, government, finance, technology, and engineering, among other backgrounds.

Our urban innovations include Delve (a generative design product that empowers real estate teams to design better, faster, with less risk), Mesa (an easy-install kit for commercial buildings that cuts energy costs, improves tenant comfort, and simplifies building operations), Pebble (a low-cost vehicle sensor to help manage parking and curb space), and Affordable Electrification (a new way to manage home energy use to meet a customer’s monthly budget). We're also developing an offsite construction company that can deliver high-quality mass timber buildings for more sustainable living and working.

With the potential to radically improve quality of life in cities for all, our work is both exciting and complex. We are working to achieve something unprecedented — help us build it!

What is the role?

Pebble is a low cost, easy-to-install vehicle occupancy sensor that we are working on bringing to market. You would work together with hardware and software engineering teams to provide parking operators, real estate developers, municipal agencies, and other managers of parking or curb space with the real-time data they need for better day-to-day operations and long-term planning. The team is small, but we are growing rapidly as the product matures, pilots are signed on, and interest from developers/cities/parking operators grows. You will work closely with sales, firmware/hardware/software engineering, field operations, and product management.

We are looking for a Product Design Lead role who:

• Can work on creating a design system for the software side of the product (mobile-first design, web-based) and see through its implementation with the PM & engineering team
• Is insatiably curious and can drive research and experimentation that can validate or challenge existing assumptions, while uncovering latent needs, behaviors, and pain points from target customers
• Works in close collaboration with our Senior UX Researcher to identify hypotheses for each customer pilot, creates surveys and prototypes, and conducts studies to synthesize insights into design recommendations
• Loves to combine data with insights in the form of beautiful data visualizations that answer our customers’ questions

What we expect:

• Putting users first
  • You have 6+ years of experience in product teams or venture studio organizations, in a UX/Product Design, Experience Design, or Interaction Design role. Bonus points for product experience specifically in pre-seed/seed/series A ventures and enterprise/B2B experience.
  • You have a degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Design, or other UX-equivalent experience.
  • Your design process is deeply rooted in our users and you can effectively advocate for them across the organization, including to those unfamiliar with the product development process.
• Ability to execute with design excellence
  • You have a strong base in design process and execution, including a specialty in either visual design, design research, interaction design, and/or software development. Please share your portfolio with us.
  • You can judge and execute at the appropriate level of fidelity, from paper sketches to refined mocks for production.
  • You know your tools (e.g. Figma, Adobe CS, HTML/CSS) and are ready to adopt new ones.
  • You have worked across physical and digital products–for example experience with hardware, services, packaging, and environments.
• Bias towards action
  • Ability to scope and lead end-to-end user research process, from concept ideation and boundary concept creation, to recruiting, to interview facilitation.
  • Once you’ve sketched out an idea, you find the fastest path to gain traction and begin executing.
  • Be creative: you use a diverse set of tools (storyboards, wireframes, visuals, other media etc.) to communicate your ideas effectively.
  • You take initiative and are adept with changing priorities and quick turnarounds to launch products for customers.
  • You thrive on thinking and acting like an owner, and are excited by startup environments.
  • Strong synthesis and insight development skills, willingness/ability to do this independently.
  • Ability to map user journeys & scope features to key journey moments.
• Solve problems, together
• You can articulate the product’s vision in a compelling manner, as well as the rationale and tradeoffs behind design decisions.
• You embrace the intellectual challenge of constantly reacting to and synthesizing new ideas related to the future of urban experience and technology.
• You ask hard questions and challenge assumptions to ensure that we’re solving the right problems.
• Passionate about cities
• You care deeply about cities and improving the lives of people in them, especially in the realm of transportation
• You are obsessed with privacy and constantly ask how we can build privacy into design.
• You are committed to creating more equitable and inclusive outcomes both in the workplace and in the work you do.

What you have to achieve:

• Within the first month, you’ve onboarded onto the Pebble team, and absorbed our path to getting where we are today, our motivations and goals for the near-term and long-term. You have 3-5 hypotheses that you are ready to test with customers to add to or improve the design of the software.
• By the end of month three, you’ve executed at least 1-2 studies with 1-2 customers. You’ve started to provide more actionable design ideas (in terms of UI and data visualization work), and you are more integrated into Pebble’s engineering workflow.
• Beyond the first few months, as Pebble’s go-to-market strategy and customer segment of choice is becoming more concrete, so is your plan for a design system that can be applied to all the work Pebble is doing. You have established a cadence of user testing with pilot customers in tandem with the UX Research Lead. You have found a balance between designing low-fidelity prototypes for proving out ideas as well as higher-fidelity design support for the engineers.

We are very excited to hear from you.

Sidewalk Labs is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We actively seek applicants from underrepresented communities. Even if you are not 100% sure you are right for the role, please apply and we will be happy to consider your application. All employment is based on merit and business need, and we respond to each application we receive.