Lead Product Designer, Systems
About The Position
Ancestry is seeking a Lead Product Designer to join their Vision team. This team is a small, highly flexible group that partners across the organization to shape the future of Ancestry's product experience. They focus on defining foundational design systems, patterns, and experience principles that enable cohesive, high-quality experiences across Ancestry. This role is specifically focused on systems design at scale. The Lead Product Designer will work across product areas to identify fragmentation, clarify interaction patterns, and design the building blocks that teams use to create consistent, intuitive experiences. The goal is to ensure that every experience feels like part of a connected whole, rather than owning any single area. The role reports directly to the Head of Design and collaborates closely with peers across product, design, engineering, research, content, and science to help teams move faster with greater clarity while maintaining a high bar for craft and coherence.
Requirements
- Significant experience in product, systems, or platform design within complex consumer products.
- Strong systems thinker with deep expertise in interaction design, design patterns, and scalable frameworks.
- Skilled at designing across surfaces and identifying reusable patterns that scale across products and experiences.
- Exceptional interaction and visual design craft, with a portfolio demonstrating strong systems thinking and executional quality.
- Comfortable operating as a lead individual contributor — setting direction while remaining deeply hands-on in the work.
- Experienced in partnering closely with product managers and engineers to build and evolve shared design systems.
- Strong communicator and facilitator, able to align diverse teams around shared principles, patterns, and decisions.
- Highly adaptable and pragmatic — able to balance ideal states with “good enough for now” solutions to maintain speed and momentum.
- Focused on enablement over control: reducing friction, unblocking teams, and helping others move faster.
- Comfortable working in ambiguity and across competing priorities in complex, multi-team environments.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with consumer subscription products, social experiences, storytelling products, creator tools, or products centered around memories, identity, and connection.
Responsibilities
- Define and evolve core interaction patterns, components, and design principles that ensure consistency across Ancestry’s product ecosystem.
- Identify fragmentation and opportunity areas across teams, and translate them into scalable design systems and shared solutions.
- Embed within product teams to shape early thinking, unblock design challenges, and elevate execution quality.
- Partner closely with research and customer insights teams, including direct conversations with customers, to ground system decisions in real user needs and ensure patterns reflect real-world behavior.
- Create foundational flows, frameworks, and prototypes that clarify complex cross-product experiences.
- Partner closely with design, engineering, and content teams to ensure systems are practical, adopted, and maintained.
- Bring structure to ambiguity by connecting individual experiences into a cohesive system of patterns and behaviors.
- Drive alignment across teams on how core experiences should look, feel, and behave.
- Influence product direction through systems thinking, facilitation, and cross-functional partnership.
Benefits
- health, dental, and vision
- bonus
- equity
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
