Senior Director - Product Design

Company Description

About Freshworks

Organizations everywhere struggle under the crushing costs and complexities of “solutions” that promise to simplify their lives. To create a better experience for their customers and employees. To help them grow. Software is a choice that can make or break a business. Create better or worse experiences. Propel or throttle growth. Business software has become a blocker instead of ways to get work done.

There’s another option. Freshworks. With a fresh vision for how the world works.

Freshworks Inc. builds uncomplicated service software that delivers exceptional employee and customer experiences. Our people-first approach to AI eliminates friction, helping businesses reduce complexity, lower cost-to-serve, and deliver faster, more human support through enterprise-grade yet easy-to-use CX and IT solutions. Nearly 75,000 companies, including Bridgestone, New Balance, Nucor, S&P Global, and Sony Music, trust Freshworks to power their Employee Experience (EX) and Customer Experience (CX) operations.

Fresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.

Job Description

Roles & Responsibilities

• Vision & Strategy: Define and drive the long-term design vision and strategy for integrated product portfolios.

• User advocacy: Champion a deep understanding of users to ensure products are not just functional, but indispensable.

• Cross-functional alignment: Collaborate with senior leadership in Product Management and Engineering to create a cohesive product strategy that anticipates market trends and user needs.

• Executive communication: Evangelize the power of design thinking to solve complex challenges, presenting strategies and concepts to executive stakeholders.

• Team leadership: Lead, mentor, and expand a world-class product design team, fostering a culture of excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning.

• Design execution: Oversee the entire design lifecycle:

  • Partner with our Research leader to drive foundational understanding of our user base. 

  • Partner with our PM leaders to drive a design strategy that is focused on revenue growth, and long term retention

  • Drive design excellence with your product design team. Ensure deliverables are of high quality.

  • Evangelize the work - Regular updates to leadership, as needed.

• Design systems: Partner with the Design systems leader to ensure the system serves the product needs, and stays up to date with the innovations being made in the product portfolio. 

• Data-informed process: Insist on a data-informed approach, leveraging user analytics and qualitative research to validate hypotheses and measure the impact of design solutions.

• Supercharge team velocity: Transform the design team's operational efficiency by embedding AI into daily workflows, moving beyond personal productivity to fundamentally accelerate how quickly and effectively the team delivers enterprise-grade experiences. 

Impact You Will Create

• Drive business growth: Transform business software from a blocker into a tool that propels growth by creating better experiences for customers and employees.

• Simplify complexity: Make the most complex processes simple, intelligent, and efficient.

• Drive customer retention: You are customer obsessed. You advocate for a deep understanding of our customers, the ICP, and their unmet needs. This advocacy should directly tie to improved CSAT and overall better retention (NDRR). 

• Enhance productivity: Eliminate friction to make employees more effective and organizations more productive.

• Deliver actionable insights: Tackle the immense challenge of visualizing complex relationships, streamlining critical workflows, and turning massive amounts of operational data into actionable insights.

Champion AI-Augmented design operations: Act as an early adopter and evangelist for integrating AI technologies into the end-to-end design lifecycle. Operationalize AI tools for rapid prototyping, generative asset creation, and automated research analysis to exponentially increase your team's output and elevate the quality of their strategic work.

Qualifications

• Experience: 15 years in product design, with at least 5 years managing managers and senior ICs (Principal, Sr.Staff level). 

• Domain Expertise: Extensive experience designing complex, data-rich enterprise SaaS applications.

• Portfolio: A compelling portfolio that showcases leadership and design work on products involving complex workflows, data visualization, and systems thinking.

• Leadership Record: Proven ability to build, manage, and motivate high-performing design teams in a competitive technology landscape.

• Technical Acumen: A strong aptitude for understanding highly technical domains and the ability to translate that complexity into simple, intuitive user experiences.

• AI Adoption Record: Demonstrable experience integrating AI tools and methodologies into a design team's workflow at scale, with clear examples of how this adoption improved the overall velocity and quality of the team's deliverables. 

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Design, HCI, Computer Science, or a related field.

Additional Information

At Freshworks, we have fostered an environment that enables everyone to find their true potential, purpose, and passion, welcoming colleagues of all backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and ethnicities. We are committed to providing equal opportunity and believe that diversity in the workplace creates a more vibrant, richer environment that boosts the goals of our employees, communities, and business. Fresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.