Job Description

What’s the role?

2020 has brought a dramatic acceleration, shifting consumer behavior from offline to online ecommerce at a record pace. And with that, Etsy is seeing a large influx of new and returning customers, prompting a renewed promise to our buyers for transparency, reliability and service. This role has the opportunity to reshape how we fulfill those customer promises across our marketplace through improved experiences in shipping and delivery, customization and made-to-order goods, and issue resolution. 

You’ll be a key advisor to the executive teams, helping them to assess the fulfillment space and see opportunities to better serve our customers and driving deep behavioral change.  Additionally,  you’ll be a catalyst for forging new relationships and collaboration across product groups. You’ll lead a high-performing design team and create paths for them to scale capacity and advance the product experience boldly, by strategically positioning them for partnerships and growth opportunities. 

Qualifications

What’s product design like at Etsy?

Typically, product designers at Etsy work in a squad with a product manager, 3-7 engineers, researcher and analyst. Together they drive their own part of Etsy, deliver solutions to complicated problems and get feedback directly from customers. Directors oversee a portfolio of opportunity areas, and each area is driven by product managers and squads.

Day to day, it looks like: 

Crafting your product group’s strategic roadmap, informed with insights and opportunities, through collaboration with cross-functional peers

Leading a high-visibility, cross-functional program from a customer perspective, managing relationships and collaboration across product groups 

Dedicating time to mentor, coach and sponsor managers and skip-level reports

Facilitating continuous learning and improvements, both of designers' careers and product work through launching experiments and iterating

Thinking about and improving/documenting processes for your team and the design organization

Recruiting, hiring and onboarding outstanding design talent

Director level at Etsy means:

You raise the design bar by leveling up design skills across all of Product Design and giving direction to designers within your team

You have experience using data and research to inform decision making and measuring outcomes

You can propose new, high-impact product initiatives and align the group around a vision and approach, all while taking into account capabilities and limitations of our product

You have a track record of leading through ambiguity and collaborating with research, analytics and engineers in a continuous delivery environment

You embody design quality, understand what success looks like in the ecommerce space and know how to shepherd execution to launch impactful experience change

You can think at a system level and improve how squads work with our design system

You regularly make use of your soft skills to persuade and build alignment: listening, consensus-building, decision-making

You spend time providing leadership and mentorship to managers and recommend new methodologies and approaches for design

You play a lead role in forecasting, hiring, onboarding, and improving our team’s culture and engagement

Qualities we value in designer leaders:

Effective articulation of ideas, strategy and design solutions

Expressing feedback with kindness and candor

Creation of psychologically safe spaces for idea sharing, coaching and mentorship

Tolerance for ambiguity and healthy curiosity

Translation of quantitative & qualitative insights into design decisions

Contribution to our culture: motivation, optimism, quality, integrity