About the Role:

The Head of Experience Design will develop, evangelize, and enable a “north star” learner experience for the organization and its training and job placement programs.You will lead a team of product and program designers to utilize human-centered design practices and build exceptional human-centered experiences. You will work cross-functionally with product development teams and program operations managers to align learner experience priorities and ensure that your product and program designers lead experience design execution of those priorities by delivering high-quality design artifacts. Your work will transform the experience that will scale to hundreds of thousands of learners at Merit America in the coming decade.

The Head of Experience Design is an exempt position and will report directly to Jen Mazzon and lead experience design across product and program teams at Merit America.

What You’ll be Doing:

The responsibilities of the Head of Experience Design will include, but are not limited to, the following:

Strategy

• Develop innovative, “north star” experiences to delight learners, address their pain points, and achieve positive job placement outcomes in a fast-growing, rapidly-changing environment
• Challenge the status quo and find new solutions to develop and test in collaboration with product / program designers and cross-functional teams.
• Drive and evolve the definition of what great coaching looks like for our learners, guided by learner needs and preferences as well as quantitative results of coaching experiments.
• Contribute to high-level strategic decisions and drive impact by advocating effectively for experience design initiatives and promoting a common language and set of experience design principles across the organization.

Execution

• Build, coach, and mentor a high-performing product and program design team that spans interaction, visual, curriculum, coaching / service design, and user research functions.
• Align and coordinate with Program operations on the implementation of the experience design strategy and development plan for current and new career tracks, including product and program experiments and launches.
• Develop a deep understanding of the problems that we need to solve through feedback, research and deep exploration of needs and pain points.
• Champion the experience design process and empower your team to deliver high-quality designs, including concept presentations, user flows, service and interaction designs, information architecture, wireframes, prototypes and content creation.
• Solve problems and manage input from multiple stakeholders, constantly proposing solutions when there is uncertainty and facilitating decision-making

Communication

• Be the primary voice for experience design at Merit America by sharing work, evangelizing results, and articulating vision.
• Use visual storytelling to promote empathy, understanding and advocacy for learners and coaches
• Foster a team culture of giving and soliciting feedback to raise our bar for high-quality experience design continually

What Makes a Successful Candidate:

We know that women and people of color are often less likely to apply to a position if they don’t match 100% of the job qualifications. Don’t let that be the reason you miss out on this opportunity! We encourage you to apply if you can demonstrate many of these skills and competencies. Below are the skills that are relevant for thriving in this role:

Must haves:

• Deep love of and expertise in human-centered experience design craft and quality.
• Excellent communication, coaching, and storytelling skills.
• Strong data skills; comfortable using data to inform product and program design decisions
• Experience driving transformation, change and process improvement through people, process, digital product experience, and service delivery.
• Track record of effectively building cross-functional relationships and establishing trust, respect, and competence for experience design.
• Compelling demonstration of having produced and helped others produce innovative, engaging, and impactful product and program experiences.
• Successfully combined a considered experience design process with agile development practices and experimentation.
• Experienced as an individual contributor designer and as a people manager of designers, directly driving design strategies and delivery by a design team.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, and ability to form trust-based relationships with learners, coaches, and other stakeholders
• Sense of deep personal responsibility for our collective success
• Commitment to DEIJ
• Be energized by our organizational mission and impact
• Proven history of living within our values

Nice to haves:

• Dedication to driving diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Outstanding verbal and written communication skills
• Expert people leader, mentor, and hiring manager
• Exceptional track record of creating fully online learning experiences for underrepresented groups with measurable, meaningful learning outcomes
• Deep knowledge of effective staff enablement strategies, coaching & career services,
• training and development and organization systems building
• Passion for our learners and empowering underrepresented adults through education

Other Logistics

• This position is full time: 4-day work week (Fridays are an operating day if there is a holiday closure during the week)
• Location: Remote
• Salary : $177,200 - $177,200

Our goal is to have competitive and equitable compensation. We have a market-based compensation approach which means that we benchmark each role from reputable data sources. We compare our benchmarks against similarly sized non-profit organizations with comparable annual budgets and geographical areas. We pay the same rate for the same roles and adjust to comply with statutory mandates.