About the Role
Title: Senior Product Designer, Learner Assessments
Location: Mountain View, CA / Remote friendly (US + Canada Only)
Job Description:
ABOUT KHAN ACADEMY
Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission to deliver a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Our proven learning platform offers free, high-quality supplemental learning content and practice that cover Pre-K – 12th grade and early college core academic subjects, focusing on math and science. We have over 155 million registered learners globally and are committed to improving learning outcomes for students worldwide, focusing on learners in historically under-resourced communities.
OUR COMMUNITY
Our students, teachers, and parents come from all walks of life, and so do we. Our team includes people from academia, traditional/non-traditional education, big tech companies, and tiny startups. We hire great people from diverse backgrounds and experiences because it makes our company stronger. We value diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as necessary to achieve our mission and impact the communities we serve. We know that transforming education starts in-house with learning about ourselves and our colleagues. We strive to be world-class in investing in our people and commit to developing you as a professional.
THE ROLE
Imagine being a teacher in Sarasota, Florida with a classroom full of 6th graders who haven’t had a normal year of school or learning since before the COVID pandemic. It’s the reality of so many educators and students who use Khan Academy – and our team is uniquely positioned to help them when they need it most.
We have no end of fascinating challenges that can only be solved with a deep empathy for our users, diligent product & UX thinking, and a strong drive to make a positive impact. Some questions we’re working on answering right now are:
- How do we support teachers who are dealing with the impact that the pandemic had on learning?
- How do we help students with learning gaps catch up to their grade level?
- How do we center schools serving historically under-resourced communities in our product design and development?
- How do we reach more school districts so our learning experience gets used in more classrooms?
The best part? Our work really matters: catch Sal talking to CNBC about low math and reading test scores.
We’re looking for a Senior Product Designer to deliver innovative K-12 assessment solutions. The heart of this role will be designing accessible and innovative product experiences for students in a scrappy, iterative environment. You should feel at home working in ambiguity and charting a path forward. Along with product and engineering, you will help define critical areas for re-imagining the Assessments experience, leveraging expertise from subject matter experts, new capabilities from generative AI, and data from our pilot studies. Additionally, you will be ensuring our experience is accessible and is integrated into our larger product portfolio. Because this role offers the opportunity to develop new interaction patterns and visual cues, previous experience contributing to a design system is required.
You will play a vital role on an inclusive, collaborative, small but mighty Design team, helping us fulfill the mission of the organization: to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. We genuinely care about people and value compassion in our everyday interactions. You’ll be able to be yourself, feel valued, supported, learn and grow, no matter how experienced you are.
If you’re looking for the opportunity to design and ship high-quality, innovative products that solve real problems for learners and educators, we’d love to hear from you. Even if you don’t check every box (no one does), we encourage you to apply!
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Design innovative assessment experiences for learners, positively impacting individual learning goals and metrics
- Conduct discovery work to understand key problem areas in the Assessments space
- Collaborate closely with UX research to define knowledge gaps, research plans, and execute on generative and evaluative research with support from the UX research team
- Create strategic design artifacts that help the broader organization understand how the Assessments team fits in the larger organizational product portfolio and supports our goals of deep student learning (e.g. customer journey maps, competitive analysis)
- Design WCAG AA-compliant widgets in collaboration with the Learning Components team to be prioritized for Assessment content delivery
- Regularly contribute components and style guide documentation for our design system.
- Collaborate with horizontal Learner product teams to design the end-to-end experience of how Assessments integrate with the existing educational platform
- Ideate on how generative AI features can be leveraged to support item creation and assessment content development
- Partner with the Director of Assessment and Chief Learning Officer to design iterative concepts towards the shared vision for assessment
- Partner with User Research and Data teams to understand user insights from the field, and leverage to improve the design experience
- Provide thoughtful input on the product roadmap, strategy and vision for what’s next
- Set a standard of operational excellence by driving the design side of projects effectively through strong project management, lightning-fast execution on design iterations, and clear communication.
- Build alignment across diverse teams by being able to successfully present ideas to a range of teams and stakeholders across Khan Academy.
- Invest in our org by mentoring, coaching and developing both your Design team comrades and your cross-functional partners.
- Write about, present, and share what you have learned, both internally and with the wider Design community via our blog and industry events.
WHAT YOU BRING
- You have at least 6+ years of relevant experience on an in-house product design team.
- You have at least 5+ years of conducting research and working collaboratively with a UX research team.
- You have 4+ years of experience designing accessible experiences.
- You are outstanding across interaction design, prototyping, and information architecture, with visual design chops.
- You are comfortable in ambiguous situations and dynamic environments that run similar to a startup, where you regularly interact with and gather feedback from Senior Leadership.
- You have the ability to juggle ambiguous and broad problems/opportunities along with smaller well-defined projects.
- You are a critical participant in design reviews, both in delivering feedback to teammates to strengthen their work, but also in soliciting feedback at every step of the process.
- You have strong verbal and written communication skills for technical and non-technical partners, internally and externally.
- You are scrappy, have a bias toward action, and love moving fast.
- You know how to build strong relationships cross-functionally and bring people into the conversation when their input and buy-in is crucial.
- You bring a lean approach to product design and regularly ask yourself: how do we learn quickly and ship regularly? What’s the most concise experience we can deliver that still provides value?
Qualities we value in ourselves, and those who join our team:
- Introspective, mature, low-ego, and emotionally intelligent
- Growth mindset, willingness to learn and to teach others
- Proactively seek out the people/information you need to move work forward and unblock yourself
- High comfort level working within a strong top-down product and pedagogical vision led by our CEO, Sal Khan, and our Chief Learning Officer, Kristen DiCerbo, PhD
- Able to balance the immediate tactical needs of helping deliver and ship features with scouting ahead for what’s next
- Comfortable with frequent change and ambiguous situations, like you’d experience in a startup
- Willing to roll your sleeves up and pitch in when a project goes off-script
- Excited about education and engaging learning experiences, deeply curious about how and why people learn