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Senior Director - Product Design

Freshworks

Bengaluru, KA, IndiahybridPosted 1 month ago
Freshworks logo

Skill Required

designDesign Systemrelated fieldPrototypingEngineeringdesigningAIFulltime

Key highlights

  • 15 years of product design experience required, with at least 5 years managing managers and senior ICs (Principal, Sr. Staff level)
  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Design, HCI, Computer Science, or a related field required
  • Role focuses on integrating AI tools and methodologies into the design team's workflow at scale
  • Nearly 75,000 companies trust Freshworks, including Bridgestone, New Balance, Nucor, S&P Global, and Sony Music
  • Company is committed to equal opportunity and diversity in the workplace
  • Design portfolio showcasing leadership on complex workflows, data visualization, and systems thinking required

Role overview

Freshworks Inc. builds uncomplicated service software that delivers exceptional employee and customer experiences. The company's people-first approach to AI eliminates friction, helping businesses reduce complexity, lower cost-to-serve, and deliver faster, more human support through enterprise-grade yet easy-to-use CX and IT solutions. The role itself involves defining and driving the long-term design vision and strategy for integrated product portfolios, leading a world-class product design team, and championing design thinking and AI-augmented design operations across the organization.

Responsibilities

  • Vision & Strategy: Define and drive the long-term design vision and strategy for integrated product portfolios.
  • User advocacy: Champion a deep understanding of users to ensure products are not just functional, but indispensable.
  • Cross-functional alignment: Collaborate with senior leadership in Product Management and Engineering to create a cohesive product strategy that anticipates market trends and user needs.
  • Executive communication: Evangelize the power of design thinking to solve complex challenges, presenting strategies and concepts to executive stakeholders.
  • Team leadership: Lead, mentor, and expand a world-class product design team, fostering a culture of excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning.
  • Partner with the Research leader to drive foundational understanding of the user base.
  • Partner with the PM leaders to drive a design strategy that is focused on revenue growth and long term retention.
  • Drive design excellence with the product design team. Ensure deliverables are of high quality.
  • Evangelize the work - Regular updates to leadership, as needed.
  • Oversee the entire design lifecycle.
  • Partner with the Design systems leader to ensure the system serves the product needs, and stays up to date with the innovations being made in the product portfolio.
  • Insist on a data-informed approach, leveraging user analytics and qualitative research to validate hypotheses and measure the impact of design solutions.
  • Supercharge team velocity: Transform the design team's operational efficiency by embedding AI into daily workflows, moving beyond personal productivity to fundamentally accelerate how quickly and effectively the team delivers enterprise-grade experiences.
  • Drive business growth: Transform business software from a blocker into a tool that propels growth by creating better experiences for customers and employees.
  • Simplify complexity: Make the most complex processes simple, intelligent, and efficient.
  • Drive customer retention: Be customer obsessed. Advocate for a deep understanding of customers, the ICP, and their unmet needs. This advocacy should directly tie to improved CSAT and overall better retention (NDRR).
  • Enhance productivity: Eliminate friction to make employees more effective and organizations more productive.
  • Deliver actionable insights: Tackle the immense challenge of visualizing complex relationships, streamlining critical workflows, and turning massive amounts of operational data into actionable insights.
  • Champion AI-Augmented design operations: Act as an early adopter and evangelist for integrating AI technologies into the end-to-end design lifecycle. Operationalize AI tools for rapid prototyping, generative asset creation, and automated research analysis to exponentially increase the team's output and elevate the quality of their strategic work.

Requirements

  • Experience: 15 years in product design, with at least 5 years managing managers and senior ICs (Principal, Sr. Staff level).
  • Domain Expertise: Extensive experience designing complex, data-rich enterprise SaaS applications.
  • Portfolio: A compelling portfolio that showcases leadership and design work on products involving complex workflows, data visualization, and systems thinking.
  • Leadership Record: Proven ability to build, manage, and motivate high-performing design teams in a competitive technology landscape.
  • Technical Acumen: A strong aptitude for understanding highly technical domains and the ability to translate that complexity into simple, intuitive user experiences.
  • AI Adoption Record: Demonstrable experience integrating AI tools and methodologies into a design team's workflow at scale, with clear examples of how this adoption improved the overall velocity and quality of the team's deliverables.
  • Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Design, HCI, Computer Science, or a related field.

Additional details

  • About Freshworks: Organizations struggle under the crushing costs and complexities of "solutions" that promise to simplify their lives — to create better experiences for customers and employees and to help them grow. Software is a choice that can make or break a business, and business software has become a blocker instead of ways to get work done. Freshworks offers another option with a fresh vision for how the world works.
  • Freshworks Inc. builds uncomplicated service software that delivers exceptional employee and customer experiences.
  • Their people-first approach to AI eliminates friction, helping businesses reduce complexity, lower cost-to-serve, and deliver faster, more human support through enterprise-grade yet easy-to-use CX and IT solutions.
  • Nearly 75,000 companies, including Bridgestone, New Balance, Nucor, S&P Global, and Sony Music, trust Freshworks to power their Employee Experience (EX) and Customer Experience (CX) operations.
  • Tagline: Fresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.
  • At Freshworks, the company has fostered an environment that enables everyone to find their true potential, purpose, and passion, welcoming colleagues of all backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and ethnicities.
  • Freshworks is committed to providing equal opportunity and believes that diversity in the workplace creates a more vibrant, richer environment that boosts the goals of their employees, communities, and business.
  • Closing tagline: Fresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.
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