Nathan James is looking for a skilled Product Design Lead to join our team in producing a well balanced assortment of competitively priced and design forward products that will provide our customers with an excellent experience and allow us to continue delivering on our mission.
People-first company, design-first home.
We are a design-first, home furnishing company focusing on the habits of urban dwellers and first time home buyers. We pride ourselves on the best in class customer happiness, providing the highest possible quality products that are affordable for the majority and assembly that isn't dreadful.
As a people-first company, we understood from day one the importance of being fully distributed. We are consistently working to eliminate unnecessary friction at work, most importantly preserving the human experience. We don’t believe that people should have to change who they are nor waver their values in order to have a career.
As a Product Design Lead, you will own and execute end-to-end product development, focused on delivering positive customer experiences and high volume driven designs. You will work collaboratively across the engineering team to produce easy to assemble knock-down products, with the best quality possible at an affordable price.
While focused on product development, the Product Design Lead will always need to be keeping quality and construction in mind. This includes working with cross-functional teams to ensure quality throughout the product's lifecycle. Working collaboratively with the engineering team to understand defects and seeing them through to resolution, learning from mistakes for future development.
This role will be the driver in generating $20M+ of revenue each year with new developments and expanding product lines across the home category, while continuously improving our product experience.
What you’ll do
- Evaluate market research, design trends and competitive price points to determine volume opportunities for a data driven product assortment
- Prepare design concepts &specifications through sketches that will be communicated to engineers
- You will guide the engineering team by providing a preliminary technical product line plan, including target retail, materials and key selling design features.
- You will become well versed with our vendor's specialties to develop within their capabilities
- Work with cross-functional teams to ensure quality throughout the product's lifecycle.
- Work collaboratively with engineering team to understand defects and seeing them through to resolution, learning from mistakes
During training, you’ll be expected to be proactive in your process and learn quickly. Once fully up-to-speed (2-3 months) You will be able to present a strategic product assortment across multiple sub-categories within home furnishing. Including supporting market research, consumer insights and internal sales data that identify emerging trends, resulting in high volume performing products.
We understand, now more than ever, that time is infinite. That’s why with everything we work toward, we try to solve for happiness. Happiness means a lot of different things to different people, so we put in the work that goes into building an inclusive and supportive place for you to do the best work of your career. Our values and our benefits are designed to support a healthy relationship with your work. Our operating values provide the framework we use in building a happy and resilient organization.
We also understand working for Nathan James isn’t the main function of your life, and we don’t expect that! We’ve found that a team member who will be happy and fulfilled as a remote team member at Nathan James is someone who values their personal life and identity outside of work.
That’s why we don’t create mandatory team hangouts or events. We focus on how to improve collaboration, not forcing engagement.
We collaborate best when we listen and learn from each other. We become stronger when we advocate new perspectives and viewpoints. This gives us all the chance to amplify our voices to achieve our goals. We focus on what we’re solving for, so we don’t create barriers or expectations that distract us from our mission. We also don’t set unreasonable working hours, deadlines, or goals. We create with calm, “slow is smooth and smooth is fast”.
When you join the Nathan James team, you can expect a thorough, but mindful onboarding process with ramp-up time to learn. You can expect to give and provide direct feedback. You can expect minimal meetings. You can expect to work with smart and good people. You can expect to be counted on. Most importantly, you can expect to do the best work of your career here.
You are a passionate, analytic, self motivated individual with a strong eye for design and can create a compelling, customer obsessed product line. You have strong communication skills both verbal and visual, ability to be agile and have experience as a designer working with affordable knock down furniture.
Thoughtful products are the heart of what we create at Nathan James. You get excited about pushing the boundaries on product experience, especially when it comes to home! You're eager to unlock your own potential, and subsequently unlock even more rapid growth for Nathan James’ product function as this role will experience a lot of change over the next 6 - 12 months as we expand into new product categories.
For this role we do require that your normal workday has at least 4 hours overlap with the Montreal workday (currently UTC-5) without impinging on your personal/family life. Our salaries are competitive for similar roles based in the country you will be working from.
This is a remote role, since we are a remote company. With the freedom and flexibility of a remote role comes the luxury to work in whichever manner helps you perform your best! However, this ideal is best coupled with an individual who has a keen ability to self regulate and self manage.
Our team works from home offices, co-working spaces, and coffee shops. You’ll find us in places that foster effective writing, self-discipline, and comfort with open communication.
If everything you’ve read so far is exciting you in a very natural and not forced way, then you are the type of person to be a key contributor to innovation and scaling a business like Nathan James!
With these benefits, we want and expect you to take vacations, spend time with your family, be conscious of your wellness, invest in broadening your education, and strengthen your personal happiness.
HOW TO APPLY:
Please submit an application here that speaks directly to this position. There are no right answers or cookie-cutter expectations. A cover letter is not required, but those that clearly demonstrate how Nathan James would be a great fit for you and how you would be a great fit for us, will be given full attention and are highly appreciated.
You’ll hear from us about advancement to a video screen and then on to a work sample, where you’ll get a chance to see the types of challenges you would be solving in this role. Our interviews are all remote by video chat (no software needed), with your future colleagues, on your schedule.
We aim to make an offer and have this person start by the end of April.
We appreciate your consideration in having Nathan James be part of your career.
Our open conversation starts with this post. We look forward to hearing from you.
Check us out on LinkedIn here!
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