Senior Product Designer

Focused•Chicago, IL

7h•£72,000 - £97,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At Focused, we move quickly to deliver quality software that achieves client outcomes and meets their customers' needs. We strategically partner with our clients to leverage our expertise in design and software, while our clients bring their own domain expertise. We work with a variety of clients from different industries, collaborating as we get new products to market, modernizing legacy systems, or helping teams learn the skills they need to be successful. Our Values Listen first • We are experts in product practices but lifelong learners in the domains of our customers. We listen to our clients, we listen to our users, and we listen to our peers, to collaborate and understand. Learn why • We ask questions and talk to users to understand problem spaces, objectives, and goals, which allows us to deeply invest and drive towards the outcomes of our clients. Love your craft • We love diving into a variety of domains and solving problems. We take pride in delivering value, in communicating progress, and guiding our clients to success. At Focused, our Designers are both practitioners and experts in their craft. This role plays a crucial part in shaping how we approach product and UX across our client engagements, from early discovery through to delivery. We balance user needs, technical constraints, and business objectives, and increasingly, that means understanding how AI fits into the products we build and the workflows we use to build them. With clients, we develop trust and influence. We are unintimidated and unintimidating. With colleagues, we set the standard for thoughtful, human-centered design.

Requirements

Love getting in front of clients, running workshops, sharing your learnings, and bringing them along on the design process journey
Bias toward action when it comes to getting work done
Quickly dive into a problem space, assess the situation, understand goals, and drive toward productive outcomes
Break down design problems into actionable, clearly communicable steps
Bring empathy, humility, and a learning mindset to everything you do
Stay up to date with the latest research, UX, and visual design trends, including how AI is reshaping what products can do and how users interact with them
Thrive in fast-paced, quickly changing environments and are comfortable with ambiguity
Ask the right questions, provide critical thinking and feedback to your team, and contribute to a culture of learning
Don't just build what clients ask for. You dive into a space, understand the business objectives, and propose solutions that best solve the problems at hand
Understand how the design process fits into agile software development
Are excited about what's happening in the AI space but stay focused on delivering real value to users, not chasing novelty

Nice To Haves

Experience designing AI-enabled products, including conversational interfaces, agentic workflows, or LLM-powered features, with a focus on usability and user trust
Familiarity with the technical landscape of agentic systems (LangChain, LangGraph, or similar) and how design decisions shape what's buildable
A portfolio that demonstrates both classic product design craft and thoughtful approaches to novel AI interaction patterns

Responsibilities

Lead the full design process throughout the product lifecycle, from early discovery and research through wireframing, user testing, implementation, and in-production iteration
Balance user needs, technical constraints, and business objectives to solve problems effectively, including evaluating where AI capabilities genuinely improve user experience versus where they add complexity
Create design deliverables that define products, including sketches, workflows, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity visuals
Design for AI-powered experiences, including conversational interfaces, agentic workflows, and AI-assisted features, with a clear eye on transparency, trust, and usability
Lead user research efforts including usability testing, contextual inquiry, and user interviews to make informed product decisions and build empathy for users
Guide clients through your design process, explaining the why behind decisions and next steps
Plan, run, and facilitate workshops for clients, including client-facing demos and project kick-offs
Collaborate with developers, product managers, and clients to determine priorities and best next steps that deliver value toward a client's vision
Stay curious about what's happening in the AI space and help evolve how we design AI-native products, sharing what works and what doesn't