Director, Founding Product Designer

We are searching for a Founding Product Designer to lead the design vision and execution of a new platform that bridges divides to regularly identify what constituents truly agree on and help turn it into effective policy and action. We’re setting a course to create something more engaging to citizens, more persuasive to government leaders and more efficient to scale. As the founding designer on this team, you will act as a player-coach, setting the design vision, defining the craft, and working hands-on across discovery, prototyping, and execution as the product moves from concept to reality.

The ideal candidate is a world-class product designer who thinks in systems and primitives to make complexity feel simple and simplicity feel meaningful. They understand and embrace AI as a means to better experiences, increased agency, new patterns, and more efficiency. Most critically they want to be part of a pragmatic and ambitious team made up of the best people in the world operating with integrity and urgency. This is a chance to help build something that matters - shaping not just an interface, but an entirely new way people engage with civic decision-making.

More on the problem space: Democracy is under strain. Only 28% of Americans say they are satisfied with how it works today, the lowest level ever recorded. At the same time, AI-driven economic and social disruption will demand faster, more effective government responses than our institutions are built to deliver. We are building a product to surface the public will on major issues by combining large-scale civic input with informed, representative dialogue, then activate that will at scale by mobilizing millions to shift the incentives that shape public policy. By using the same technologies that threaten democratic legitimacy, we aim to give citizens more voice than ever before, identify shared agreement across political differences, and enable collective intelligence at scale.

Change.org is a public benefit company and the world’s largest social change platform, with 100M users and more than 40,000 campaigns launched monthly. Our 100% user-generated revenue model enables us to invest in new products that support healthier, more participatory democracies worldwide. This team will operate as a start-up within Change.org, benefiting from strong culture, stability and mission orientation.

Key Outcomes

• Collaboratively design the MVP product - inclusive of the individual parts and the seams between them - to ensure a cohesive end-to-end user experience

• Define the core user journey by deeply understanding user needs, barriers, and motivators, creating a vision for a product that is engaging, trustworthy, retentive, and inspires evangelization

• Define the behind-the-scenes process and tools needed to transform large-scale public input into credible, communicable outcomes to elected officials and media

• Adapt and evolve our design system to enable rapid iteration and development while maintaining experiential simplicity as the product scales

• Establish an iterative, learning-driven design culture, shifting from hands-on IC work to a player-coach role as the team scales

The most important core competencies for the role are:

• Innovation Mindset: You are world-class at 0 to 1 design. You think in systems and primitives to make complexity feel simple and simplicity feel meaningful. You understand and embrace AI as a means to better experiences, increased agency, new patterns, and more efficiency. You are comfortable with rapid prototyping and iterative learning, testing ideas before full execution, and prioritizing learning over perfection.

• Holistic Design: You design for the entire user journey, considering how users interact with a product over time, across multiple touchpoints, and in different contexts. You account for both front-stage experiences and the back-stage systems that support them. You ensure experiences are cohesive, evolving, and continuously engaging, while designing the seams between components and services.

• Design Thinking: You take a structured, human-centered approach to problem-solving that ensures products and experiences are intuitive, accessible, and valuable for users. You are skilled at deep user research, iterative prototyping, and cross-functional collaboration to create solutions that align with both user needs and business goals.

• User Empathy: You center users' emotions, motivations, and pain points in your design process and you leverage qualitative research to uncover these insights. You’re able to build for both emotional and functional needs. Your designs reduce stress and uncertainty and inspire trust and confidence.

• Leadership & Ambition: You inspire and motivate those around you to deliver meaningful impact for the business and for people. You lead with courage, practicing candid feedback up, down, and across the organization, and you model openness and values-based behavior. You build and grow high-performing teams, pushing for ambitious change while staying pragmatic. You are driven by a deep belief in We the People and our right to shape our own future, and you bring urgency, conviction, and follow-through to turning that belief into real, measurable change.

Target experience

• 10+ years of product (UX) or service design experience with a B2C focus

• Experience using AI tools to improve speed and quality of work, and designing consumer, AI product experiences

• Experience taking a product from zero to one

• Experience managing product designers and contractor specialists where needed

• Comfort operating across product and go-to-market (marketing, messaging, brand, etc..), ensuring consistency and overseeing specialists where needed to deliver on it

• Strong qualitative and quantitative user research experience with significant experience moving from discovery to experimentation

Interested? Great! Here's what you should know:

This is a full time, remote role based in the US.

Our compensation philosophy is based on pay equity. All of our salaries are determined before we launch a role – they are based on a predetermined salary scale, the level on that scale and the cost of labor for that location. The annual salary for a Founding Product Designer (Director level) is $265,000 in SF and NYC, $252,000 in Austin, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington D.C., and $225,500 in all other US locations.

Global benefits include unlimited PTO, 18 weeks of paid parental leave, and a variety of mental & physical health perks.

Our evaluation process is as follows:

• Recruiter screen

• Project walkthrough with our VP of Design

• Asynchronous task related to 0 to 1 design strategy

• Case study presentation + interviews with 3 cross-functional team members

• Reference checks

We know the confidence gap and imposter syndrome can get in the way of meeting amazing candidates like you, so please don’t hesitate to apply—we’d love to meet you. We also know it’s rare for someone to meet 100% of the qualifications. Please apply anyway!

We actively encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds and perspectives to apply. At Change.org, we are dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We invest in programs to support our diverse workforce, offer inclusive onboarding experiences and affinity groups, celebrate the heritage of our staff, provide training on working across differences, and maintain fair and transparent salary scales. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, or culture.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for candidates with disabilities. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.

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We are legally required to conduct EEOC reporting. While this is required by the federal government, we recognize that it does not include all genders and ethnicities. We want you to know that Change.org celebrates all identities and we thank you for your participation.http://change.org/

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While we are a global company, we ask that you please submit your resumes/application questions in English.

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