Design Director, Marketplace

About The Opportunity

At the heart of the product culture at Shutterstock, we are creatives that take pride in serving creatives and people who aspire to be. We get to do real user experience design here and believe in a collaborative working style where designers, product managers, and engineers work together to experiment and riff off each other’s curiosity to deliver amazing value to our customers. Our growing global team of diverse and talented designers and researchers are made up of fun and caring people who bring unique skill sets, perspectives, and personalities to a product team that respects autonomy and advocates for our customers.

What we need

Shutterstock is on an amazing journey to pursue our vision of being the creative partner that empowers customers to tell the best version of their stories. As part of the mission we want to help our customers find the creative ingredients that best tell that story whether it is stock photography, video, music, sound effects, graphics, templates, or 3D content. We not only want them to help to find those ingredients but we want to make them feel confident in their choice by leveraging the latest in personalized recommendations, scoring, and predictive analytics. On the other side are our customers who supply the content for our marketplace, Contributors. We want to ensure it is easy for them to submit content, understand what content the market needs, and that they feel rewarded. And that’s where you come in.

We are looking for a problem-solving, forward-thinking Design Director to lead our Marketplace Product Design Team. Someone who would be a hands-on leader to work with their peers and team to establish a UX vision, create a strategy and plan to guide the team to create best-in-class Marketplace experiences. This includes how users search, browse, and evaluate creative ingredients as well as customer conversion and purchasing funnels. It also includes how our Contributors submit, manage, and monetize their content. They will develop strong relationships with fellow Design leaders and partner closely with Research, Product Management, Engineering, Support, and Marketing counterparts throughout the product development process to launch bar-raising experiences for customers.

The day to day

• Partner with Product, Engineering, Research, Marketing, Support, and other stakeholders to identify strategic opportunities to take the experience to the next-level as well as incremental opportunities to remove friction.
• Monitor, measure, analyze, and optimize user journeys and funnels to reduce friction points and increase business KPIs.
• Provide creative direction and review the team’s work to ensure a consistent and best-in-class customer experience across our ecommerce and contributor platforms.
• Employ analytics and research insights to measure the experience to ensure we are meeting UX and business KPIs as well as to inform design decisions.
• Leverage UX strategy and design thinking techniques to synthesize, visualize, and identify opportunities to improve the Marketplace experience and customer journeys.
• Ensure the team is delivering on defined outcomes, on time, with great quality, and that they are measuring their own work.
• Stay up to speed with, and be an ambassador of, emerging user experience and ecommerce trends as well as the competitive landscape.
• Prioritize your team’s time and focus, placing team members on results-oriented work that complements their skills, career ambitions, and growth opportunities.
• Identify risks/blockers for yourself and the team and clear them with a sense of urgency.
• Educate and advocate for what your team needs to be successful. Including establishing/maintaining processes and workflows that enable your team to maximize their impact and satisfaction.
• Provide day-to-day coaching and direction that elevates each person’s skills, satisfaction, work, and impact.
• Collaborate with other UX leaders to help shepard the UX team culture and identify areas to improve processes and techniques.
• Extensively post GIFs and emojis throughout Slack channels.

What does success in the first year look like?

• Lead the team in the creation of a vision for the Marketplace from a UX perspective. Including but not limited to mission and design principles.
• Define a strategy, plan, and guide the team’s execution of said plan to analyze and identify opportunities to optimize both our conversion funnel as well as search user journeys to reduce friction points and increase business KPIs.
• Establish a UX dashboard to monitor and measure UX related KPIs and relevant business KPIs as well.
• Collaborate with the UX Creative Director to re-envision our homepage and overall site experience to excite and inspire our customers, and to reflect our entire set of solutions.
• Coordinate with the UX Creative Director, Product, and Engineering to define a plan and timeline for iteratively implementing new brand guidelines throughout the platform as well as streamlining inconsistent experiences in high impact areas.

What you bring to the role

• You have ten plus years of experience in digital product design, with five plus years managing and leading a design team.
• Your background includes having led teams to launch successful and highly visible digital products in a consumer marketplace showing your ability to balance conversion best practices with brand-centric and human-centered design.
• You are a beacon for design craft: You are well versed in UX strategy techniques and bring deep expertise in UX design (frameworks, interaction models, prototypes, research) and design thinking.
• You are a systems thinker who can think holistically and can identify and abstract repeatable design patterns and guidance. You think big, framing designs in the context of the broader customer experience, and are equally comfortable diving deep into the details when needed.
• You are an influencer of design direction and earn the trust of your team, peers, as well as cross-functional partners and stakeholders. You are right a lot, but are also humble and welcome a healthy debate. You are able to look at opportunities and issues from all sides, form a point-of-view, advocate for what you believe in, and bring people along with you.
• You are a wise decision-maker, you prioritize effectively, using data from research and analytics to inform your decisions, weigh the impact and tradeoffs of decisions, and seek input from stakeholders where needed to drive alignment.
• You are a role model, mentor, and motivator of other designers and leaders. You have the ability to truly understand what each individual on your team needs to thrive and feel fulfilled. You are invested in growing people, developing talent, and creating an environment designers are proud to be part of.
• You are a force multiplier in that you are adept at scaling your influence and abilities. You can develop processes that drive quality and efficiency to help designers accomplish more than what they could otherwise.
• You are a compelling communicator, facilitator, and presenter. You have excellent verbal, written, and visual communication skills. You can capture and hold an audience’s attention when presenting, and can facilitate a room to drive desired outcomes.
• You have a portfolio of experience that showcases your team’s work, business impact, and examples of the ways you led and leveled-up the team and their process and work.

Why Shutterstock

For the same reason your future co-workers enjoy working at the company!

• The user experience that you will lead has a direct impact on creative people across the globe. Your projects will launch; and in realistic timelines. You will have room to influence teams across the organization.
• Management and leadership care personally. They prioritize growth and planning your career path with your goals and passions in mind.
• We value your ‘Me time.’ One afternoon a week, we free our schedules of meetings and during the summer, we take Friday afternoons off.
• Culture is important. As a company, we value ‘We time.’ We like to connect regularly, share fun stories, critique work, vibe off each other, and spend time building relationships through coffee chats, social hours, trivia events, and the like.
• Flexibility to work between home and office with everything you need to be successful in both. To help you set up your home office, we'll cover a screen, computer, peripherals, etc.
• Extensive benefits package including training, a fitness benefit, and employee assistance program.
  

At Shutterstock, we are committed to providing competitive pay and benefits that are in line with industry standards. The compensation package offered may vary depending on employment experience, skills, and knowledge. You may also be eligible for our generous benefits package including health, wellness and financial benefits. Compensation ranges for candidates in locations outside of the location(s) below may differ based on the cost of labor, market, and additional factors.

The Pay Range For This Position Is Below

• 165,000 - 225,000 per year in New York
  

Note: Commission-eligible roles are expressed as on-target earnings (base and commission). Non-commission roles are expressed as base salary only but are also eligible for annual incentives.

Shutterstock Principles

We are one team collectively focused on creating an unrivaled experience for our Customers and Contributors. Our principles represent the mindset of the employee who will thrive at Shutterstock. If you are passionate about what you do, and want to become part of a cutting-edge technology company building industry leading products, please apply.

The referenced salary range is based on the Company’s good faith belief at the time of posting. Actual compensation may vary based on factors such as geographic location, work experience, market conditions, education/training and skill level.