Job Description
Director of UX and Product Design
locations: USA Remote
time type: Full time
job requisition id: R10077
Credit Acceptance is proud to be an award-winning company with local and national workplace recognition in multiple categories! Our world-class culture is shaped by dedicated Team Members who share a drive to succeed as professionals and together as a company. A great product, amazing people and our stable financial history have made us one of the largest used car finance companies nationally.
Our Support teams work with multiple departments in a dynamic environment that promotes flexibility and autonomy, while offering the opportunity to collaborate with a diverse group of professionals. We work to comply with our company standards, exceed customer expectations and drive our Great Place to Work culture. Through the consistent delivery of quality services and understanding the needs of our business, we develop innovative improvements as we strive towards our company’s Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals!
This is an exciting time for Credit Acceptance, as we transform the way that we work to drive big innovation in the auto financing industry. As Director of UX and Product Design, you will be an integral member driving this transformation. You will work on complex initiatives at the intersection of finance and technology, developing experiences that change peoples’ lives.
The Director of UX and Product Design plays a pivotal role in driving innovation, cultivating a talented team of designers, and establishing an effective Information Architecture and Information Design to ensure our products are user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing, and aligned with our business objectives.
Outcomes and Activities:
- This position will work from home; occasional planned travel to an assigned Southfield, Michigan office location may be required. However, this position is permitted to work at a Southfield, Michigan office location if requested by the team member.
- Lead and manage the product design team: recruit, hire, guide, coach, mentor, and foster a collaborative and creative environment that cultivates talent.
- Develop and execute the overall design strategy, incorporating user research, market trends, and business goals to create compelling product experiences.
- Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including product management, engineering, marketing, to ensure seamless integration of design throughout the product development lifecycle.
- Drive the development of intuitive and visually stunning user interfaces, interaction patterns, and information architectures across multiple platforms.
- Establish and maintain a design system, design standards and guidelines, ensuring consistency and coherence across products and platforms.
- Conduct regular design reviews and provide constructive feedback to elevate the quality of design deliverables.
- Advocate for user-centered design principles, championing user research and usability testing to inform design decisions and drive product improvements.
- Present research findings, design concepts, and recommendations to stakeholders, including executive leadership.
Competencies:
- Customer-Centric: Fully understands and embraces the customer perspective and stays focused on desired outcomes to achieve product-market fit. Displays empathy and approaches problems from a customer’s mindset before providing solutions. Deeply experienced in human centered design, design thinking and jobs to be done.
- Business-Focused: Adept at balancing user-centric design for exceptional user experiences and business realities such as technical feasibility, resource allocation, and time-to-market. Utilizes a hypothesis-based experimentation mindset, iterates and tests hypotheses regularly and champions high impact outcomes.
- Technology-Driven: Leverages the best modern technologies to imagine, build and deliver revolutionary results. Collaborates effectively with product and technical teams to deliver amazing products to market efficiently with quality. Deeply understands end-to-end user journey and how changes impact the enterprise and applications.
- Transformational Leader: Communicates, partners and influences across teams to deliver winning product experiences and outcomes. Serves as the visionary to set vision and direction across teams. Creates deep partnerships and trust through transparency and inspires partners to collaborate and win together. Embraces change and guides others in managing the impact of change.
Requirements:
- College degree in Design, Human-Computer Interaction, a related discipline, or recent equivalent experience in a related field.
- Minimum 15+ years of experience as a Product Designer or Head of Product Design.
- Extensive experience in product design, with a strong portfolio showcasing your expertise in creating exceptional user experiences across various platforms.
- Proven track record of leading and managing design teams, with the ability to inspire, mentor, and develop talent.
- Deep understanding of user-centered design principles, information architecture, and interaction design.
- Strong strategic thinking and problem-solving skills, with the ability to balance user needs, business objectives, and technical constraints.
- Excellent communication and presentation skills, with ability to articulate design concepts and advocate for design decisions to stakeholders at all levels.
- Organized self-starter who develops plans and has ability to perform with minimal supervision in a team environment.
- Experience working according to Agile principles, sprint-based approaches and collaborating with cross-functional teams.
- Excellent leadership and persuasion skills and the ability to lead through influence without direct authority.
- Experience interacting with people at all levels of an organization, including Executive Management.
- Proficiency with design, collaboration, product management and user analytic tools.
- Passion for innovation, staying current with industry trends and emerging design practices, and applying them, where it makes sense, to create exceptional products.
- Ability to travel 0-15% of the time.
Preferred:
- Experience and understanding of consumer auto buying journey.
- Fintech apply, contract, and servicing of loans.