Lead Product Designer

Brightplan

2d•$165,000 - $195,000•Remote

About The Position

BrightPlan is seeking a Lead Product Designer to spearhead the design of their next-generation financial wellness experience. This senior individual contributor role offers significant ownership and autonomy, blending hands-on product design with leadership in design systems, practices, and strategic direction. The Lead Product Designer will be instrumental in shaping 'App 2.0', translating product strategy, customer needs, and engagement goals into intuitive and accessible experiences for both desktop and mobile environments. Collaboration will be key, working closely with Product Management, Engineering, Customer Success, and customers throughout the design lifecycle, from initial concepts and information architecture to prototypes, validation, and implementation. A significant aspect of this role involves exploring and defining BrightPlan's AI-first design practice, experimenting with AI in design workflows, and establishing scalable, AI-enabled processes while maintaining a strong sense of design craft and judgment. Approximately 80% of the role will focus on design and creation, with the remaining 20% dedicated to design leadership, process development, and cross-functional alignment.

Requirements

Significant product design experience with a portfolio demonstrating shipped work across complex digital products.
Experience leading end-to-end product design for major features, experiences, or new products — from early concept through implementation.
Experience establishing, owning, or significantly evolving a design system used in a component-based development environment.
Strong interaction, visual, information architecture, and prototyping skills, with fluency in Figma or comparable modern design tools.
Working knowledge of WCAG 2.2 AA and experience applying accessibility principles during the design process.
Experience using AI in product design and a genuine interest in experimenting with how AI can improve design workflows, exploration, and scale.
Strong systems thinking and the ability to balance individual feature needs with consistency across the broader product experience.
Strong partnership skills with Product Management and Engineering, including the ability to communicate design rationale, navigate implementation tradeoffs, and move decisions toward execution.
Comfort operating with significant autonomy in a small, fast-moving organization where you’ll be expected to establish direction rather than wait for it.
An evidence-based approach to design and a willingness to test assumptions, measure results, and iterate.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing financial services, employee benefits, healthcare, or another regulated or trust-sensitive product.
Familiarity with React Native, shadcn, Tailwind, or similar component-based development frameworks. Coding is not required, but you should understand how design systems and components translate into implementation.
Experience working with accessibility audits, VPAT/ACR findings, or third-party accessibility partners.
Experience using product analytics tools such as Mixpanel to inform design decisions.
Experience designing AI-enabled product experiences or experimenting with AI agents and other emerging AI design workflows.

Responsibilities

Lead product design for App 2.0, taking experiences from concept through implementation, including information architecture, user flows, wireframes, prototypes, interaction design, and high-fidelity UI.
Translate product functionality, customer requirements, and business priorities into clear, intuitive experiences designed to improve engagement and adoption.
Design responsive desktop and mobile-optimized experiences, accounting for differences in user behavior and interaction across form factors.
Establish and evolve our App 2.0 design system, including components, patterns, tokens, behaviors, documentation, and governance.
Partner closely with Engineering to ensure design intent translates effectively into implementation and to minimize UX drift, unnecessary custom components, and design debt.
Build accessibility into design from the start, applying WCAG 2.2 AA principles across product and design-system work and partnering with Engineering and our compliance team to address accessibility findings.
Help define BrightPlan’s AI-first design practice, experimenting with AI across ideation, exploration, prototyping, design variations, documentation, and other parts of the design process.
Explore and develop AI-enabled design agents, skills, instructions, and workflows that can increase design capacity and consistency while preserving strong design judgment.
Develop a thoughtful point of view on how AI should influence the product experience and what an AI-first financial wellness experience can become.
Use customer input, product analytics, experiments, A/B testing, usability feedback, and established UX practices to validate design direction and measure impact.
Engage directly with customers, our Customer Advisory Board, and other stakeholders to understand needs, present concepts or prototypes, and validate design decisions.
Support App 1.0 design needs during the transition to App 2.0 as development priorities increasingly shift toward the next-generation experience.