Director of Product Design

Swiftly, Inc. is on a mission to help cities move more efficiently through their leading transit data platform. The Director of Product Design will lead a senior design team, shape the design vision, and collaborate closely with Product Management and Engineering to enhance product experiences and improve mobility in cities.

Responsibilities:

• Translate company, product, and team strategy into a clear design vision and bring teams along by showing them where it leads
• Articulate and share this vision with leadership and the company at large to catalyze, align, and energize the company in making cities move more efficiently
• Work closely with Product Management and Engineering leadership to build a cross-functional product development engine that understands the power of design and emphasizes product experience, lovability, and impact
• Lead design reviews that are genuinely excellent, where the team’s work gets sharper
• Refine and scale the practices around them: a maturing design system, systematized user research, and a design ops model that keeps pace with how the craft is evolving
• Set the standard for design experiences across native mobile, web platform, and agentic workflows
• Help your team balance refined design opinion with direct usage & anecdotal feedback to ensure our products stay intuitive, fresh, and focused on solving real problems
• Realize a cadence of rapid iteration and execution, encouraging designers to share early and often, make decisions with the right amount of information, drive alignment across functions with living prototypes, and maintain dev-ready designs in lock step with development
• Champion AI-accelerated design iteration by embedding rapid, seamless AI prototyping into discovery, design, and dev processes, compressing concept-to-dev-ready timelines and deepening real-time collaboration between PM and Engineers throughout the product development cycle
• Represent Product Design and the greater Product Org alongside Product Management and Engineering in company leadership meetings, bringing customer pains and insights to life to inform strategy
• Build on Swiftly’s culture of curiosity, feedback, and inclusion, helping designers stretch their craft, challenge ideas with care, and grow through collaboration

Requirements:

• 10+ years of product design experience, with 5+ years in leadership roles
• Proven success shaping design strategy for B2B or B2B2C products with consumer-grade usability standards
• Experience hiring & coaching junior and senior designers through the full life-cycle of design, from conception to completion, sharing the vision through design explorations, documentation, and presentations
• Proven ability to scale design orgs and systems in a matrixed, cross-functional team environment
• Experience creating and maintaining multi-platform design systems (mobile, desktop, APIs, etc. Hardware is a plus.)
• Deep expertise in making complex, data-heavy applications feel specially crafted and delightful for users
• Experience designing thoughtful AI/ML-powered products that not only solve problems but also build customer trust
• Communication that commands the room; concise, energizing, and able to distill complexity into a clear point of view