Director Product Design - UX/UI

kate spade new york•New York, NY

19h•$175,000 - $190,000

About The Position

The Director Product Design UX/UI leads the end-to-end digital product design vision across key ecommerce experiences, translating customer insights, business strategy, and brand priorities into high-performing digital experiences. This role mentors (a player coach) a team of product designers while remaining deeply connected to the work — setting experience strategy, raising the quality bar, establishing scalable design patterns, and partnering closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Analytics, Brand, and business leadership. The ideal candidate is a strong product design leader who can operate across strategy and execution: someone equally comfortable defining a multi-year experience vision, navigating complex stakeholder environments, mentoring designers, and getting into the details of a critical customer journey.

Requirements

Significant experience in product design, UX design, or digital experience design, including experience leading designers and complex initiatives.
Experience designing high-traffic consumer digital products; ecommerce, marketplace, retail, or similarly complex transactional experiences strongly preferred.
A portfolio demonstrating exceptional interaction design, systems thinking, product strategy, and measurable customer or business impact.
Strong understanding of responsive web and mobile product design.
Proven ability to use customer research, analytics, and experimentation to inform product decisions.
Experience building productive partnerships with Product and Engineering teams.
Strong communication and storytelling skills, particularly with senior and executive stakeholders.
Ability to navigate ambiguity, competing priorities, organizational complexity, and differing stakeholder perspectives without losing sight of the customer.
Strong design judgment and an ability to raise the craft bar across an organization.
Experience coaching and developing designers across different levels of seniority.

Nice To Haves

This person should believe that great design is not simply about producing polished interfaces. It is about identifying/understanding the right problems, understanding customer behavior, testing assumptions, simplifying complexity, and creating experiences that produce meaningful outcomes.
They should be comfortable challenging assumptions while remaining collaborative, and should create an environment where designers can do their best work through clear direction, thoughtful critique, evidence, and trust.

Responsibilities

Lead UX and product design across major ecommerce journeys, including product discovery, search, product detail, shopping, personalization, content, and emerging customer experiences.
Manage, mentor, and develop a team of product designers, creating clear expectations around craft, ownership, collaboration, and outcomes.
Set the experience vision for high-priority initiatives and translate broad business opportunities into actionable product and design strategies.
Partner closely with Product Management and Engineering from problem definition through launch, iteration, and optimization.
Build strong partnerships with Brand, Creative, Analytics, Research, Marketing, and senior business stakeholders.
Champion customer-centered decision making through qualitative research, experimentation, behavioral data, and competitive insights.
Establish a culture of continuous learning and experimentation, using research and testing to validate ideas before and after launch.
Create and evolve scalable UX patterns and systems that improve consistency while allowing individual brands to maintain their identity.
Guide designers through complex interaction, information architecture, responsive design, and service-design challenges.
Develop clear narratives and presentations that communicate customer problems, design rationale, strategic opportunities, and business impact to executive audiences.
Balance immediate commercial priorities with longer-term improvements to the customer experience.
Identify opportunities to simplify experiences, introduce new capabilities, and push the organization beyond incremental optimization.
Work across multiple initiatives simultaneously while helping the team prioritize the highest-impact customer and business problems.