Senior Product Designer, Community

Job Description

About Us:

We believe teachers have one of the most vital jobs in the world, and we’re here to support them. What began as a word-of-mouth marketplace where teachers could buy and sell educational resources is now a teacher-powered digital learning platform. Our community of 7M+ educators relies on us for engaging, accessible, classroom-ready materials—and we rely on our team members to continue developing solutions that improve the lives of teachers, students, and, ultimately, the state of education itself.

In 2021 we created a new team called Community to help fulfill the TPT transition to a home for all teachers. In addition to Easel, or digital tool; School Access, a new way for teachers to access resources; and our marketplace for teachers and teacher authors, the Community team seeks to connect teachers on TPT in ways that help them plan, assess, and teach day to day. This team is in discovery mode finding value that can be added in ways teachers already on TPT can connect with each other.

Role:

As a Product Designer Lead on the Community team, you’ll help us build tools and products that help teachers connect to unlock their collective wisdom, plan and collaborate, and share knowledge inside and outside the classroom. This role has a large focus on research and discovery through learning about teacher’s needs and day to day challenges and finding new products and solutions that facilitate their teaching journey. This could be finding new ways to connect our teacher authors to their buyers, or how to connect teachers within a school via School Access. Other opportunities include collaborative lesson planning, resource organization, or professional development. The Community group is also looking at non-product related value for teachers via forums, in person activities, and other ways to unlock collective knowledge.

This is a new team with a wide range of focus for how we might better connect teachers to the larger TPT community.

What’s product design like at TPT?

Product designers at TPT are trusted members of the product experience team, with a lot of opportunity to guide their team and their area of the product. They are closely connected with end users through regular participation in user research, and make design decisions based on insights from what they’ve observed.

They work in small, cross functional pods that consist of a product manager and engineers and collaborate regularly with partners in data, research, marketing, and customer experience. This design lead for Community will be working directly with product managers, researchers, and Tech leads on the roadmap and will help grow the team over time. This role could grow into management or remain a senior IC. TPT designers have a healthy amount of autonomy and responsibility in driving design decisions, but stays tightly aligned through frequently sharing work asynchronously and twice-weekly design feedback sessions.

Responsibilities:

• Work across all surfaces of TPT (from Marketplace to School Access to Easel) to improve the Community experience and unlock the collective wisdom of teachers
• Collaborate with product, research, and engineering teammates to define the future of Community on TPT
• Work through design problems from beginning to end: turning insights into ideas and then designing the workflows and interactions to realize them
• Bring your teammates into the design process through ideation workshops and feedback sessions
• Participate in discovery sessions with product, engineering, and commercial partners to drive the direction of this new team
• Communicate your work with your pod and your design partners to align and improve your designs
• Facilitate user research sessions with teachers and students with the support of ux research and product partners
• Work closely with engineers as they build and ship ideas
• Play a key part in our team’s culture, suggesting and helping implement process improvements

What we are looking for:

• Experience with the entire product development process, with strengths in visual and interactive design as well as user research
• The ability to think and design at a system level, not just individual elements or pages
• Evidence of soft skills: listening, collaborating, decision-making
• The ability to articulate strategy, value, and solutions when presenting your designs to other designers and stakeholders
• Experience designing and shipping digital products and systems, not just websites
• A portfolio that clearly outlines the problems you were tackling with your design work. It should illustrate the process and skills you applied to tackling the challenges, rather than focusing just on visuals
• 3-5+ years of experience in a similar role as a UX / UI or Product Designer

Benefits & Perks:

At TPT, we believe the positive experience of employees is essential to growth, both individually and collectively. To achieve our mission of ‘Empowering Educators to Teach at Their Best,’ we must also empower the members of our TPT Team to work at their best. To that end, two of our core company values are “We Learn and Grow Together” and “We Enjoy the Journey.” We’ve committed to these values and to our employees through investing in added benefits and perks:

• Comprehensive Medical, Vision & Dental Benefits
• Free Telemedicine Membership - 24/7 access to trusted medical advisors
• Generous PTO and Wellness Days
• 5 Week “Recharge Leave” after 5 Years, to refresh and celebrate the impact you’ve had at TpT
• Generous Parental Leave (for new parents) for time to adjust to parenthood, plus additional six weeks for the birth parent
• ‘Employee Resource Groups’ (ERGs) to promote employee inclusivity and belonging
• Engineering Learning Fridays (ELF), to provide a space each week for Engineering teams to collaborate and learn from each other
• ‘Professional Development’ Stipend, to support the professional growth of employees (including - but not limited to - subscriptions, books, lectures, etc.)
• Annual Company Events (Camp TPT, Field Day, Hackathons, Holiday Party, Summer Picnic, Classroom Visits, etc.)

Here at TPT we value Diversity and Inclusion and encourage people to bring their most authentic selves to work. We cultivate an environment where people are recognized and celebrated for their individuality.

Any TPT applicant who requires reasonable accommodations during the interview process should contact the TPT People Ops Team ([email protected]) to make the need for an accommodation known.

Finally, if you’re a California resident, California law requires that we provide you notice about the collection and use of your personal information. We encourage you to read it carefully. You can find our full notice here .