Design Director

Posted Nov 21

We are open to remote candidates. 

Companies ready to change the world come to MetaLab to create products that improve lives, reshape markets, and shift culture. Design Directors at MetaLab play a pivotal role as they drive the quality of the work and nurture the unparalleled talent of our design team.

Design Directors shape our design approach, ensuring team success and top-notch work quality. They embrace change and thrive in uncertainty. They’re clear communicators, attentive listeners, and continuous learners, comfortable driving both clients and peers. They are strategic leaders who set clear visions, guiding teams in crafting great experiences. They tackle intricate challenges and always aim to design beloved products.

Responsibilities:

Lead by Doing

  • Balance leadership responsibilities with active participation in project execution, working alongside your team and cross-functional partners.
  • Demonstrate excellence as an executor of design, creating and shipping beautiful and exciting work.
  • Utilize and teach a deep understanding of the product design process, design systems, product strategy, and human-centered design practices.

Client Engagement and Delivery

  • Partner with Account Directors to align with and drive clients' business priorities, ensuring the delivery of exceptional value.
  • Roll up your sleeves, dive into the work, and provide guidance to multiple project teams simultaneously.
  • Own the responsibility for the level of design excellence, delivering constructive and actionable feedback as necessary.
  • Present work effectively, gaining buy-in from client stakeholders and adeptly managing feedback from diverse stakeholder groups.

Strategic Thinking and Project Success

  • Apply change management and service design rigor to MetaLab’s design recommendations.
  • Collaborate with the Partnerships team on estimations and provide a design perspective on business development opportunities.
  • Build strong relationships with key client stakeholders, understanding their goals and priorities for project success.
  • Develop a distinct MetaLab point of view in collaboration with the leadership team on your account.

Advocacy and Leadership Within MetaLab

  • Foster an open, collaborative, and inclusive environment for the design team.
  • Collaborate with MetaLab’s leadership team to maintain high company engagement.
  • Work alongside the VP, Design, and other senior design team leaders to drive the overall design team’s vision and operational plan.
  • Advocate for the design team internally to ensure optimal conditions for success.
  • Vet, hire, and train new members of the design team.
  • Mentor the team of Design Leads, serving as a leader of leaders.
  • Actively participate in the design community, representing MetaLab to attract top talent and potential clients.

Technical Competencies:

UX Design: You play a key role in defining UX quality at MetaLab and establishing the standards. You understand your team’s UX strengths, guide UX methodologies used by project teams, unblock teams through exercises and facilitation, and drive innovation within UX experiences, creating solutions that don’t currently exist. You foster a culture of continuous learning, best practices, and staying on top of industry trends.

Visual Design: You understand the importance of and can create divergent visual design directions. You critically assess the work, take an eternal lens to evaluate solutions, and ensure quality and differentiation. You advocate for emerging design trends, tools, and practices, such as 3D, spatial design, and new tooling.

Product Strategy: You champion the integration of sound product strategy in decision-making, challenging clients with clear rationale. Collaborating with the product team, you contribute to the development of early project hypotheses, ensuring a well-rationalized perspective. You elevate the design team, emphasizing the importance of aligning design workflows with product strategy, and consistently connecting epic/feature prioritization to the overall product release strategy, roadmap, and vision.

Critique and Collaboration: You apply critique best practices beyond design to systems, processes, and cross-functional work, actively supporting project teams in implementing effective methods, such as seeking external feedback. You mentor junior team members in improving their feedback exchange. Your active and consistent involvement in critiques spans project, departmental, and company-wide levels, including client interactions, where you adeptly guide them in providing constructive feedback with the support of senior team members.

Research: You’ll collaborate with UX researchers, gathering qualitative and quantitative evidence to support design decisions. You understand how research data can help measure the success of the work and leverage research findings to inform design decisions and create user-centered solutions.

Content Design: You skillfully utilize language to elevate product experiences and address design challenges, ensuring persuasive, on-brand communication that aligns with both design requirements and business objectives. Your proficiency spans a spectrum of writing styles, from plain to playful, as you assess and communicate the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Through your advanced grasp of English grammar, you adeptly translate business goals, user needs, and brand strategy into written content across various design artifacts, actively contributing innovative ideas to enhance others' content decisions. 

Selling Design: You understand how to communicate ideas and design rationale without “selling.” Employing human-centric storytelling, you craft narratives that achieve buy-in from the toughest stakeholders. You mentor design team members in effective work presentations and actively contribute to identifying and proposing future design projects for clients. Collaborating with other leads, you prepare successful proposals and pitch presentations, showcasing past work to build confidence. Your active participation in new business meetings represents the design team's capabilities and philosophies.

Vision: Leading a design team, you guide the development of experience concepts from ideation to final visual design and prototyping. This includes setting a clear design brief based on project goals and previous research. Actively reviewing and collaborating, you ensure high-quality idea generation and execution. Crafting summative presentations with storytelling, you effectively communicate project rationale and outcomes to gain client and stakeholder buy-in. You differentiate recommendations, identify market gaps, and encourage the incorporation of emerging design trends and technology for a future-proof vision. Collaborating with the team, you articulate a compelling product vision that inspires and aligns with everyone involved.

Creative Direction: Through visual communication principles and best practices, you’ll support the overall creative impact of a project. You make purposeful and creative choices in your work and can discuss design choices. As a leader, you’ll guide the entire project team's work, present to clients, and navigate complex client feedback.

Systems Design: You’ll bring the ability to define standards for managing design at scale using reusable components and patterns. You’ll consider the end users of a design system, along with client and user context, ensuring usability, maintainability, and adoption.

Brand Strategy: You can confidently lead workshops to establish brand foundations, and collaborate seamlessly with brand team members. Translating workshop outputs into a distinctive brand strategy, you consistently create compelling creative territories with thoughtful image selection and rich storytelling. Autonomous in connecting creative territories to brand foundations, you confidently present well-executed concepts, guiding clients toward new and exciting directions while consistently embodying brand foundations in visual design.

Requirements:

  • Proven experience in managing and mentoring a design team through complex design challenges with a focus on high-quality output.
  • Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to achieve buy-in from diverse stakeholders.
  • Experience in collaborating with cross-functional partners to drive client business priorities and deliver value.
  • Active engagement in the design community, sharing your experiences and insights through articles, panels, and platforms, with the support of our marketing team.
  • Ability to foster and influence an inclusive and collaborative environment within your team and wider MetaLab culture.
  • Knowledge of change management and service design principles.
  • Ability to build and maintain strong relationships with key client stakeholders.
  • Strategic thinking and the ability to contribute to business development opportunities.

Pay Range

While this role can be filled in a variety of global regions, as an organization headquartered in BC, Canada we are required to include the pay range for this role if it were to be filled in BC. This range may be higher or lower depending on the candidate's region and market conditions, when outside of BC. 

Expected Pay Range: CAD $180,000 - $215,000

Equal opportunity employer

Research shows that women and other marginalized groups tend to only apply for a job when they meet every single criteria. Does this role sound like it was made for you, yet you don’t check every box? Reach out anyways! We’re an equal opportunity employer and are dedicated to fostering an inclusive and diverse environment for employees from all walks of life. We hire based on talent, and we’re proud of our global perspective.