Senior Product Designer

Company Overview: Everything we do is for educators. We’re partnering with them to advance a bold vision for education that boosts district performance and student success. At Follett Software, we empower educators across roles with technology that streamlines processes and manages information and resources to improve their schools, increase student success, and drive the future of education. We believe that by empowering educators to amplify their impact on students’ lives, we can change the world. Our goal and mission is to drive the future of education. We are inspired by educators to deliver transformative technology. Our innovative, connected solutions simplify challenges and offer a seamless and intuitive experience. POSITION SUMMARY This position leads the definition and design of intuitive, accessible, and outcome-driven product experiences across Follett Software’s portfolio, setting the bar for design quality, modeling strong product design practice, and influencing how the team approaches discovery, framing, and delivery. The Senior Product Designer is a core part of the product trio and partners closely with Product Managers and Engineers to understand educator workflows, frame the right problems, and deliver solutions that are valuable to customers, usable in the real world, feasible to build, and effective for the business. As a senior contributor, this designer also helps shape design team standards, mentors designers, and brings strategic perspective to complex, ambiguous problems across the portfolio. This role carries elevated product design accountability. The Senior Product Designer is expected to shape discovery, workflows, interaction models, usability, and experience quality from concept through launch, while influencing how the broader team approaches design quality, tradeoffs, and decision-making. Success in this role requires sophisticated judgment, deep collaboration, comfort with ambiguity, and a pragmatic mindset that values speed, learning, and iteration over perfection. This role also contributes to modern AI-enabled product work, including trust patterns, fallback behavior, prompt-aware experiences, and the responsible use of AI tools to accelerate research, synthesis, prototyping, and design iteration while maintaining strong human accountability. POSITION SCOPE • Lead product design end-to-end for complex, high-impact initiatives, often spanning multiple products or platform-level concerns, collaborating with product management and engineering to identify the right customer problems, shape the experience approach, and deliver solutions that create measurable value. • Bring clear product design accountability by driving user understanding, workflow clarity, interaction quality, usability validation, and experience tradeoffs in close partnership with Product Managers and Engineers. • Work pragmatically and move with speed, using the appropriate level of fidelity for the problem, favoring progress and learning over perfection, and iterating quickly based on evidence from research, analytics, prototypes, and feedback, and model this approach for the broader design team by sharing frameworks and heuristics that help others make better tradeoffs. • Create the design artifacts needed to move work forward, including flows, wireframes, prototypes, high-fidelity designs, and handoff specifications, while applying and helping evolve Follett design standards, accessibility expectations, and shared components, raising the bar for artifact quality, handoff clarity, and documentation standards across the team. • Partner closely with Product Management & Engineers from early discovery through build and QA to ensure solutions are feasible, well-scoped, and executed with high fidelity to validated design intent. • Drive the definition of modern experience patterns for AI-enabled features, including trust signals, disclosure patterns, uncertainty states, fallback behavior, and other interaction choices that improve clarity and user confidence. • Champion a strong cross-functional product culture by leading critiques, running design reviews, coaching other designers, and establishing team norms that support shared problem solving and post-launch iteration, always balancing user needs, business goals, and delivery realities. • Mentor and support junior and mid-level designers through feedback, pairing, critique facilitation, and informal coaching, helping grow design capability and consistency across the team. • Identify systemic experience problems, gaps in design standards, or workflow inconsistencies across the portfolio, and proactively propose and lead efforts to address them. QUALIFICATIONS • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Product Design, UX Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, Graphic Design, Psychology, or a related field, with 5+ years of relevant product design experience required, including a portfolio demonstrating leadership on complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives. • Demonstrated ability to contribute to and evolve design systems, including advocating for new patterns, driving governance, and ensuring cross-product consistency at scale. • Demonstrated experience designing digital product experiences in a SaaS, platform, or workflow-heavy software environment, with a strong portfolio showing problem framing, workflow design, interaction design, visual design, and shipped product outcomes. • Strong ability to work as part of a product trio (Product Design, Product Management, and Engineering), collaborating effectively with Product Managers and Engineers to discover, design, ship, and improve products, including the ability to influence how the trio operates by pushing for earlier design involvement, stronger discovery practices, and better decision documentation. • Proficiency with Figma and modern design and collaboration tools, along with experience using AI tools responsibly to accelerate research synthesis, ideation, prototyping support, and design iteration. • Experience conducting or synthesizing usability testing, customer research, behavioral analytics, and other product signals to inform decisions and improve experiences before and after launch. • Expert understanding of information hierarchy, interaction design, and accessibility, including the ability to set accessibility standards for a team and advocate for inclusive design practices with engineering and product partners, and exceptional communication skills for explaining rationale, tradeoffs, and recommendations across Product, Engineering, GTM, and leadership audiences. • Experience working on platform-level or multi-product design challenges where decisions have broad downstream impact, and a track record of influencing strategy through design-led discovery. • Demonstrated ability to lead design critiques, establish feedback norms, and coach other designers informally or formally, contributing to a culture of craft, learning, and high standards. WORK ENVIRONMENT This role is remote and only open to candidates currently located in the United States and able to work without sponsorship.  It requires a suitable space that provides a private and quiet workplace. Work hours and schedules are set to accommodate the requirements of the position and the needs of the organization and may be adjusted as needed.  PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS Perform tasks in a home office environment with frequent virtual meetings, communications, and interruptions, requiring effective time management and prioritization. Prolonged sitting with sustained visual focus on digital screens, requiring the ability to interact at a typical working distance. Frequent use of keyboard and mouse, involving repetitive hand movements and fine motor skills for typing, navigating, and handling materials. Occasionally adjust position or move within the workspace to reach, retrieve, or access items, involving bending, twisting, or reaching, and occasionally lifting or carrying items weighing up to 10 pounds. Travel requirements: Minimal (less than 10%) This job description is intended to convey information essential to understanding the scope of the job and the general nature and level of work performed by job holders within this job. However, this job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of qualifications, skills, efforts, duties, responsibilities or working conditions associated with the position. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of the job. At Follett Software, our people come first. We’re deeply committed to supporting the well-being, growth, and success of every Team Member. That commitment shows up in a thoughtfully designed, comprehensive benefits package that helps you thrive—at work and in life. Here’s what you can expect: Fully remote work, giving you the flexibility to do your best work from anywhere in the continental U.S. (unless otherwise noted) Subsidized healthcare plans, including orthodontic coverage, with HSA option that includes employer matching Company-paid disability and life insurance, with the option to enhance coverage through voluntary plans Robust Paid Time Off, including Flex PTO for salaried roles, paid parental leave, company holidays, and paid volunteer service time Retirement savings with employer match, vesting every pay period Flexible Spending Accounts for healthcare and dependent care Optional supplemental coverages, such as accident, hospital, and critical illness insurance, identity theft and credit monitoring, and legal protection services Meaningful recognition and tangible rewards that celebrate achievements, fuel motivation, and recognize both individual and team success EEO Follett Software provides equal employment opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or disability. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to, among others, individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans. If you are interested in applying for employment and need assistance or an accommodation in the application process due to a disability, please contact us by email and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. Email: recruiting@follettsoftware.com CCPA Notice for California Residents: https://follettsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Notice-to-California-Applicants.pdf