Director of Product Design - remote

Mobile technology is revolutionizing how organizations engage with their end users. More than 96% of the world’s population has access to a mobile phone, meaning it is now possible to reach nearly every single person on the planet. Yet 3 billion people living in emerging markets still lack access to relevant, timely, and engaging information in their local languages, and their voices remain underheard. The organizations that serve them lack the technology and capacity to reach them, and many are unaware of the power of mobile technology to meet their organizational goals.

Viamo connects individuals and organizations using digital technology to make better decisions.

We’ve created a suite of products, including a national-scale information hotline called "3-2-1" that serves tens of millions of users across 18 countries. Other Viamo products delivered through our platform focus on remote education, field data collection, market-matching services, voucher management and more.

With more than 30 million people reached in 2020 alone, we are well on our way to meeting our goal of serving 50 million people annually by 2023 with life-improving information and access.

Viamo’s small and growing product design team (currently 6 members) is one year into the shift from a Customer-Led approach to a Market-led approach (with a platform strategy twist) - and we need your help! Our 5+ product teams (we call them crews) consisting of shared leadership between engineering, product management and design, are looking for a visionary design mastermind to lead the way in connecting these products together into a cohesive ecosystem that serves as foundational to our platform platform strategy and is built on creating value for our users. Part visionary and part mentor - you have the chance to change people’s lives here while having fun!

Most closely resembling a B2B2C company, a fundamental part of your job will be to lead the way for end-to-end user research and ensure we design for the needs of...

Thankfully, for this challenge you have the increasing support of a company that is quickly learning the power that an empowered Design team can provide to help achieve its business objectives through focusing on improving user experience which delivers greater value to users, thereby growing the platform. To ensure the continued evolution of Design’s role at Viamo, you will be part of the core cross functional team participating in Jared Spool’s 6 month UX Leadership program with weekly group coaching. Fantastic eh?

🌍 You will lead a team of product designers to help them design products and features that tie together into an ecosystem of products that form Viamo’s new platform strategy through remote and in person product and user discovery activities all over the world

❤️ You will team up with Viamo’s Tech and Product leaders and combine your collective experience across a spectrum of business model stages including: startups, market leaders and companies that have acquired others, to discover valuable and loveable services for users in emerging markets and discover the platform business models to support them.

🏀 You will effortlessly provide mentorship to aspiring designers who are hungry to learn from the best and most experienced hands in the industry, even you will be surprised at how fun (and easy) it is to steer designers to do some of the best work of their lives that is both exciting and builds their craft/skills in their careers.

📆 You will lean into the OKR framework that Viamo has embraced and you will help your designers identify User Experience focused OKRs that help their product crews deliver on business objectives while improving the lives of users.

🛠 You will work with your team of product designers to create, maintain and evolve a set of design processes and tools that will unleash collaborative product design across the company.

🧩 Since you won’t have a product crew of your own, you will build a higher level product design vision and help designers and their product crews achieve success as interconnected pieces of Viamo platform ecosystem.

👨🏾‍🌾 You will love advocating for the user at every juncture of your leadership role - being supported at all levels in the company to bring the “users first” culture to life through games, activities and other creative initiatives across Viamo.

🦹🏾‍♀️ You will help attract, identify and recruit the world's next most exciting designers from the four corners of the globe in all imaginable markets - creating a team of design superheroes going the distance for their users.

🎳 As part of Viamo’s commitment to growing its Design org maturity, you will take a lead role in weekly Design leadership group coaching sessions with Jared Spool’s UX Strategy Leaders program https://www.uie.com/leadersprogram.html along with your peers from different departments across the company who are also stakeholders in growing Design’s maturity across the company

💡You will collaborate with key internal Viamo stakeholders including our Design and Implementation team, to discover and evolve how their roles and functional needs can be better supported in the products and services they manage in deployments/projects.

📣Communicate up, down and sideways! Communicate down, inclusively and respectively, to align with your product designers, communicate sideways with your senior management counterparts to sync and get early feedback on cross cutting initiatives and communicate up to Viamo’s VPs and exec to keep them informed of what we are learning from and building for our users.

Your measurement of success will be connected to the success of the Product Design function as a whole. KPIs will be agreed upon and may include: * Platform/internal user NPS scores * Design cycle time (e.g.: time from feature concept to dev-ready designs) * Product design success rates, measured with product managers (could be UX Success metrics)

Viamo is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity and encourage applications from all candidates. We believe that diverse perspectives help our teams to create innovative solutions and understand our global clients' needs. In alignment with our values, we are committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse global workforce without discrimination.