Director of Product Design

Director Of Product Design

FMX builds and delivers software through small, embedded product trios: a PM, a designer, and two engineers, each owning a suite of products end-to-end. We're hiring a Director of Product Design to own design strategy across the company, lead our design team, and stay hands-on in delivery.
This is a player/coach role. On the player side, you'll own the design work for one product-suite trio, shaping and validating solutions with customers through AI-accelerated design and high-fidelity concept builds. On the coach side, you'll set the vision and quality bar for design across every product suite, grow and develop the team, steward the design system, and partner with Product and Engineering leadership to make design a driver of business outcomes. The balance leans toward leadership, but you stay hands-on. Protecting that split, and protecting your team's focus, is part of the job.
Team & Charter Context:
Embedded as the designer in one product-suite trio (assignment finalized during onboarding), while leading the design function.
Three Product Designers plus one User Researcher shared across all trios, with room to add designers and managers as the team grows. You allocate the shared researcher deliberately and level-load designers across suites that run on different cadences.
Suite-based trios, each owning products that serve similar customer outcomes across the full tier ladder.
You report to the VP of Product and sit alongside Product and Engineering leadership. Design leadership has been missing from that picture until now, and you'll define what it looks like.
How We Work:
We validate solutions early with customers using high-fidelity concept builds: interactive prototypes, coded prototypes, and hybrid approaches.
Designers partner side-by-side with engineers ("concept builders") during concept creation. Ideation, interaction design, prompt-driven exploration, and iteration happen together, rather than through a handoff.
Delivery runs as a continuous flow. Work gets pulled by capacity, discovery happens alongside delivery, and a designer and engineer can shape and validate a concept the same day it comes up.
Cycles move fast: concept, test, learn, iterate.
Responsibilities:

As the Director of Product Design, you will:

Do the work (embedded designer)
Own the design work for one product-suite trio: frame problems, map user flows, and design and validate solutions with customers.
Use AI-powered design and prototyping tools to explore workflows and UI patterns quickly, and co-build coded prototypes with engineers to test with users.
Run rapid, formative usability tests on concept builds and drive iteration before delivery.
Set design strategy
Own the design vision across all product suites and align it with the company's product and business strategy.
Define what good looks like for FMX design, and build the roadmap to raise design maturity from where it is today to a consistent, strategic function.
Bring an outside-in point of view on where design and AI-accelerated workflows are heading, and decide how FMX should adopt them.
Lead and grow the team
Manage, mentor, and develop the design team through regular 1:1s, constructive critique, and career development matched to each person's strengths and goals.
Give the team air cover. Buffer designers from misalignment so they can focus on the work, and represent design's priorities with Product and Engineering.
Own hiring, onboarding, and the design career and progression framework, and build the team structure that scales with the org.
Own craft, quality, and the design system
Set and hold the quality bar across suites through critique and clear standards, so the experience stays coherent as trios go deeper into their own products.
Own the design system, including the component library, design standards, and interaction patterns (for example, when to use a form versus a natural-language experience), and keep FMX's UX modern, coherent, and appropriate for our user roles.
Set standards for the AI-accelerated workflow: decide what to speed up with AI and what still needs human research and judgment, so faster cycles don't come at the cost of quality, accessibility, or ethics.
Partner across the org
Work with Product and Engineering leadership to fold design into how bets are shaped, scoped, and delivered.
Advocate for the value of design and user research with executives and across departments, and make the case with evidence: usability findings, analytics (Userpilot), and outcome data.