Product Design Lead

Who We Are

The Farmer's Dog was born from a mission to change the landscape of pet health, providing dogs and their humans with honest, smart, and simple care. We're starting by radically improving the $90 billion pet food industry, replacing bags of highly-processed pellets with a personalized subscription service that sends complete and balanced, freshly-made dog food directly to customers' doors. Our ultimate goal is to create innovative, delightful and personalized experiences across all aspects of pet care, and we believe our direct-to-consumer business model, holistic approach to growth, and dynamic culture uniquely position us to shepherd this backwards industry into the future.

To date, The Farmer’s Dog has delivered over 1 billion meals nationwide and raised over $150M in funding to help us build a company as healthy as the dogs who are eating those meals. Join us as we continue to develop ways of bringing peace of mind to customers, health to their companions, and much-needed change to the way people feed and care for their pets.

#LongLiveDogs

A tech note: technology has been and will continue to be at the core of how we are going to build the future above. We think that a small, but creative and free team can accomplish more than a large, bloated, unconstrained, bureaucratic one. We are accelerating our pace of innovation and are making substantial industry-changing new disruptions that will continue to improve the lives of millions of pets, pet owners, and pet care professionals.

A design note: design can change the world, and leading with the experience is at the heart of our product strategy and vision. Design is an act of co-creation that facilitates our understanding through continuous prototyping and customer feedback loops. We believe in intentionally shipping high-quality experiences rather than running experiments to see what sticks. The details are not the details. They inspire trust and make customers fall in love with our product.

A financial note: we are not waiting for a magical moment in the future to be sustainable. We are fiscally prudent, and we have never bitten more than we could chew. We have raised over $150MM where others have deployed more than a billion to reach a similar size.

What We Stand For and Where You'll Come In

You are a craftsperson at the highest level and someone other designers and partners seek out and learn from.

You'll make an immediate impact by elevating our design through your strong visual and interaction design skills. You'll be able to simplify complex concepts and develop designs that are easy to understand and foster trust in our product and service. As a design lead overseeing Acquisition, Sign-Up, and Onboarding "pawds," you will educate users about the product and help them sign up for a service tailored to their dog's unique needs. You will connect strategy across different work streams, ensuring a holistic end-to-end experience.

You'll also lead our design system effort by establishing quality craftsmanship and working on developing our next-generation UI/UX. Your role is pivotal in implementing a strategy to move us towards our Northstar, and shaping the future of a category-defining product and user experience.

You lead by doing and approach every pixel and word on the screen with purpose. You also have the ability to simplify complex messaging and functionality into easy-to-understand, simple, and intuitive experiences.

You'll provide invaluable mentorship to other designers, helping elevate the team's skills in visual design and producing beautiful UI experiences. Additionally, you'll play a key role in contributing to our overall experience strategy and partner cross-functionally to ensure our experience is solving customer needs and optimized across all touchpoints. 

One Team: We don’t think of ourselves as “Acquisition Marketers”, “Engineers”, “Data Analysts”, or “Product Managers”. Beyond denoting skill sets and areas of expertise, we don’t think departments matter. We’d rather align ourselves to the goals we’re working to achieve and make sure we have necessary subject matter expertise to drive meaningful impact. We strive to orient ourselves around customer problems TOGETHER – getting the right people, with the right context, in the right rooms/Zooms to solve problems holistically.

We are skeptical about everything and precious about nothing:  Ideas can and should come from anywhere, and we aren’t tied to our own. We proactively source input. We talk to our customers and leads regularly and are quick to change course if we know there’s a better or more impactful way to solve problems.

We consider the customer journey in all of our decisions:  We know that no interaction exists in a silo and therefore understand how important every single one is.  We ensure our strategy sets prospective and new customers up for success and drives long-term retention.  We answer questions and address problems early and proactively.  We understand the value of different channels, initiatives, and messages and know how to articulate impact and advocate for prioritization holistically.

We Execute For Impact: We don’t subscribe to “best practices” or “industry KPIs”. We’re uninterested in how we compare to “benchmarks”; instead we orient ourselves around being the best we can possibly be. Similarly, we don’t subscribe to rigid or classical expectations of roles – i.e. acquisition is hyper-focused on improving customer retention and experience.

We Are Focused and Work Without Assumption: We are not beholden to ideas. We have goals and believe everything beyond that is a series of hypotheses to validate. To that end, we seek to work in sequence and not in parallel. We constantly ask ourselves, “what’s the most important hypothesis I should be working on right now? How do I confirm or reject that hypothesis as fast as possible?”. We rarely have timelines/deadlines and are constantly taking in new information and adjusting our priorities accordingly. We don’t expect to be perfect the first time.

How You'll Make An Impact

• Lead design across initiatives to ensure a cohesive experience connecting customer and business goals.
• Make others around you better, and regularly mentor design team members.
• Dream big, innovate, and drive a holistic experience across digital and physical touchpoints.
• Shape improvements to how we work, critiques, and meetings.
• You uncover systemic IA interaction issues and advocate for improvements.
• Leverage data (quant and qual) to inform decision-making and embrace continuous improvement.
• Balance creating vision and iterating towards that vision.
• Use scientific methods and experiments to drive desired outcomes.
• Drive projects from insights to high-quality implementation.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners to contribute to product and experience strategy.

We're Excited About You Because

• You are an expert in craft, typography, and visual systems.
• You think in terms of experiments, platforms, and systems.
• You have experience working with Design Systems and a keen eye for upleveling and maintaining quality throughout the product.
• You have experience implementing a major visual refresh across a complex product or service.
• You are excited about tackling complex problems and communication hierarchies and creating simple and delightful experiences. 
• You obsess over every pixel and word on the screen while also being able to zoom out and think strategically and holistically.
• You have a strong entrepreneurial drive and bias towards action.
• You can function independently and in a team environment with excellent collaboration skills, expert knowledge, and a low ego.
• You have experience working in a fast-paced startup environment.
• You are skilled in Figma and excited to learn and adopt the latest design tools.

Office guidelines

We are an in-office culture, made of in-office people who thrive on the collaboration and magnetism of working in a shared space. We are seeking individuals who excel in this type of environment, where being present fosters deeper connections and engagement.

Our DEI Philosophy:

Our company’s mission is rooted in deep, genuine care for dogs – and for the people who love them. As an organization we are full of individuals who are unique in many ways, but all united in a mission of providing true peace of mind to dog lovers everywhere. Fixing this industry and improving the lives of pets and their people will be a difficult, decades-long endeavor. We believe the best use of our time, energy, and resources as a collective team is to focus on this mission, and on supporting our team to do their best work and be their best selves. In support of this we’re committed to hiring and supporting a diverse workforce, and investing in internal structures, opportunities, hiring/promotions processes, and training that create and sustain an inclusive team. We strive to provide an experience at TFD that will be invested, meaningful and memorable as we progress on the journey to reimagine how we feed and care for our pets.

A Few of Our Best Benefits

• Dog-friendly office in Greenwich Village
• Market-competitive compensation and equity packages
• Comprehensive Healthcare, Dental, and Vision
• 12 week paid parental leave
• Competitive 401k plan with company match
• Flexible PTO and WFH policy
• Discounted fresh food for your pup
• Your pet interrupting video calls (and in-person meetings) is now a feature, not a bug

We commit to building a competitive compensation package and company environment for all individuals to thrive. We believe in competitive base compensation rooted in location specific market data and performance along with equity ownership in the company that allows every team member to build their personal wealth as the company grows, just as much as we believe in fostering a culture that supports our team members personally, professionally, and holistically. For this role the anticipated hiring base compensation range is $195,000 - $205,000 USD Annual and the compensation offered will include a robust market competitive package of base and equity. In addition to your base compensation offer you will also receive equity ownership in the company. More information about the value of this equity will be shared at the time of offer. This range is representative of NYC Market Data if you are applying to this role outside of the NYC area the range may change.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

The Farmer's Dog, Inc. is an equal employment opportunity employer and does not discriminate in hiring on the basis of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, creed, national origin, physical or mental disability, protected veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic or status. For more information, please visit Know Your Rights.

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