Staff UX Research & Design Program Manager

At Compass, we envision a world where the experience of selling or buying a home is simple and pleasant for everyone. Founded in 2012, Compass provides an end-to-end platform that empowers residential real estate agents to deliver exceptional service to their seller and buyer clients, all in service of our mission to help everyone find their place in the world.

We are looking for a hands-on, strategic-minded thought leader to build and lead research and design operations to take our platform to the next level. In this role, you will be responsible for defining how we work together, how we get work done, and how our work creates an impact for our customers and our organization. You will work collaboratively with researchers, designers, engineers, product management, and other program managers, leading projects throughout the planning, design, and development lifecycle. As the UX Research and Design Program Manager, your emphasis will be on planning and prioritizing research and design deliverables, resource management, schedule tracking, mitigating project risks, and collaborating with design leads to deliver innovative solutions across workstreams.

At Compass, you will:

• Collaborate with and guide processes for the Research and Design team in delivering best-in-class experiences.
• Anticipate challenges and opportunities to mitigate risk.
• Point out connections and reconcile possible collisions between different product offerings, features, and platforms.
• Apply your breadth of experience to model, prototype, and iterate on ways our team works.
• Align cross-functional stakeholders and build trust across teams.
• Set the foundation for the discipline and building the team to support a scaling research and design organization.
• Provide stakeholders with visibility and updates on key initiatives.
• Evaluate and implement new tools with researchers, designers, and cross-functional partners to solve for our growing need to collaborate.
• Define and keep up-to-date documentation of how the Research and Design team works.
• Put repeatable and scalable processes in place that help us plan and manage multiple parallel UX projects and meet our objectives.
• Developing and maintaining onboarding, research and design culture, and career development programming for our team.

What we look for:

• Embodies our Entrepreneurship principles - Obsess About Opportunity, Move Fast, and Dream Big.
• At least 7-10 years of experience managing scalable Design Operations.
• Exemplifies excellent written and verbal communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills and uses them to roll out large-scale programs effectively.
• Proven ability to efficiently manage cross-functional projects, dependencies, and bottlenecks.
• Experience escalating issues, anticipating and making trade-offs, balance the business need versus other constraints, and maximize business benefit while building great customer experiences.
• Demonstrate skills and confidence in weighing risk and making fast decisions - knows when to release quickly and when to "measure twice."
• Ability to work effectively with tight deadlines in a fast-paced environment.
• Is proactive in seeking and providing opportunities to improve and expand the team, including team members' skills and experiences.
• Exhibits an autonomous mastery of craft and best practices.
• Experience developing scalable process improvements that maximize talent allocation and achieve high-level business objectives.
• Background working in collaborative, multi-disciplinary UX Research and Design teams.

At Compass, our mission is to help everyone find their place in the world. This means we continually celebrate the diverse community different individuals cultivate. As an equal opportunity employer, we stay true to our mission by ensuring that our place can be anyone's place.

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