Senior Product Designer

  • Tokyo
  • Remote OK
  • Full-time
  • August 4, 2021
Conditions
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Apply from Anywhere 👍
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Relocation to Japan 👍
(Overseas visa sponsorship supported)
Requirements
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Language Requirements
Japanese: Not Required 👍
English: Business Level

Job Description

Want your work to be seen by millions of users around the world? SmartNews has won numerous awards and has been downloaded by millions of people. We’re looking for a talented designer who wants to build the world’s greatest news app—and help us deliver quality information that matters to humankind. Together, we’re working to break through the filter bubble and eliminate fake news. Join us and make a difference!

You are passionate about creating holistic product experiences for users from all different walks of life. You are mobile first in your design approach, and are able to rally your peers around a concept. You can align both design and user experience to the strategy and business goals of the company, while clearly defining the “what and why” all the way up to the executive leadership team. Most importantly, you know that design is fundamentally about understanding people’s behaviors, interpreting between needs and wants, and creating a conduit between the product and the user in service of improving the person’s daily life.

Responsibilities

  • Communicate and present the “what” and “why” of design decisions and approaches to range of audiences within company from executives to product teams to engineering teams
  • Present and effectively communicate conceptual ideas, design rationale and the specifics of user-centered design process
  • Partner with product managers and engineers to translate business problems and product requirements into compelling product solutions that provide a delightful user experience and aligns with company strategy
  • Create information architecture diagrams, wireframes, prototypes, and user flows to develop and evolve product concepts
  • Gather and evaluate user feedback through user interviews, feedback surveys and user testing
  • Combine quantitative data analysis and qualitative user research methods to build deep understanding of user behavior and inform product strategy
  • Develop design guidelines, style guides, best practices and templates to scale the design practice within the company and educate the organization on how design drives company goals
  • Juggle multiple responsibilities across the entire lifecycle of a project from prototyping a concept to leading design reviews to developing designs for production
  • Collaborate closely with cross-disciplinary teams including engineering, marketing, ad sales, and external consultants
  • Execute under the constraints of scope and timelines while maintaining high integrity of design and UX principles

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications

  • Minimum of 7 years experience working as UX designer on a mobile consumer app in a multi-disciplinary, collaborative teams
  • Strong background and experience in information architecture and design
  • Experience in running whiteboard sessions to communicate a concept or strategy
  • Excellent verbal and communication skills, articulating design decisions and storytelling
  • Ability to effectively manage time, prioritize tasks, and work within deadlines with little supervision
  • Ability to provide clear, honest and objective feedback in order to continue raising the bar for the product and design team
  • Expert in the tools of the trade, e.g. Adobe CC, Sketch, and various design and prototyping software
  • Possesses high attention to detail and consistency
  • Must be a team player, open to accept feedback from anyone, and recognize that good ideas can come from anywhere, no matter the level or job description
  • Passion for the news as a fourth pillar of democracy and belief in mission to create better understanding and accountability between people through delivery of quality information not based on filter bubbles
  • Business level English

Preferred skill/experience

  • Knowledge of programming, mobile iOS or Android, or HTML/CSS/JavaScript
  • Multidisciplinary background such as Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Sociology, or Anthropology
  • Experience managing or mentoring designers or building a design team. This role has potential to grow to be a leadership management role.
  • Business level Japanese

Recently crowned Japan's latest tech unicorn, this company runs a wildly successful news service that’s powered by machine learning. It's an engineering-focused company (One of co-founders is an engineer) and they have offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Shanghai, Beijing that are apparently doing quite well too.

The mission of SmartNews is to discover and deliver quality stories to the world. Since its inception in 2012, the SmartNews app has been downloaded over 50 million downloads and maintained a monthly active user count of over 20 million.

In addition to being one of the most popular smartphone apps in Japan, SmartNews has worked hard on building their business in the US. They now have partnerships with over 300 major news publications in the US like CBS, Entertainment Weekly, Business Insider, National Geographic and more. They’ve had a great deal of success due to their ML-based sorting and recommendation systems.

SmartNews has a highly diverse development team with many world-class engineers and others working from their offices in Japan,China and the US. They maintain a very strict hiring bar for technical hires and an engineering-driven culture that makes them one of the strongest tech companies in Japan when it comes to technical skill level.

SmartNews is looking to hire the best people regardless of background, so they’re willing to hire people that don’t speak Japanese and (under normal circumstances) bring them to Japan from overseas if necessary. Everyone works together as one team regardless of location, and SmartNews provides everything their employees need to do their best work and maintains a Silicon Valley-inspired culture for engineers in Tokyo.

SmartNews's policies during COVID-19 are as follows:

  • All interviews are being conducted remotely
  • Employees are working remotely following the government’s instructions
  • They've given everyone some monetary incentive to support working from home
View SmartNews's company page
Senior Product Designer at SmartNews
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