Lead UX Designer

Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more – all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business globally.

The team marries technology with creativity to build world-class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses. We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world. 

Here are a few reasons why we think you’d love working here:

1. Building the future of Disney’s media: Our Technologists are designing and building the products and platforms that will power our media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.

2. Reach, Scale & Impact: More than ever, Disney’s technology and products serve as a signature doorway for fans' connections with the company’s brands and stories. Disney+. Hulu. ESPN. ABC. ABC News…and many more. These products and brands – and the unmatched stories, storytellers, and events they carry – matter to millions of people globally. 

3. Innovation: We develop and implement groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms, and solve complex and distinctive technical problems.

The Disney Entertainment & ESPN (DE&E) Technology Design team thinks beyond what is possible today. They discover, disrupt, and chart a course to where our fans and consumers will be next. Design brings the Disney magic to life by building digital customer experiences via the entire portfolio of both consumer-facing products and internal products and tooling. This includes Sports, Entertainment, News, Streaming and Enterprise Products and Experiences.

The enterprise portfolio team is responsible for empowering cast members to do their best work and ensure Disney magic reaches customers globally. From a content management systems that enable curation and programming of our content, to helping prepare our content for domestic and international theatrical release and distribution - to complex platforms that manage all of our metadata that lives within each of our titles - to how we support the exciting world of broadcast, provide better customer support, to tools that help us experiment, or use data to tell business intelligence stories - it is critically important – and our colleagues, partners and businesses will be relying upon us to bring imagination, ease and consistent excellence to those experiences.

Disney Entertainment & ESPN’s Product Design team is seeking a Lead Product Designer who will be an exceptional role model to our growing team. You'll guide and mentor a hardworking design team, focused on crafting intuitive and elegant human-centric experiences for Enterprise products. The right person for this role must have experience in developing both comprehensive and future-forward experiences and a proven ability to inspire and mentor designers to push the boundaries, as well as keeping focus on optimizing the details of current experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Lead product design for the DE&E Technology Enterprise Design team, supervising the work of at least 1-2 other designers

• Partner with product and engineering to identify requirements, use cases, and user journeys

• Illustrate and communicate complex design solutions across uses cases by creating process flows, wireframes, prototypes, and high fidelity mock-ups

• Use data collected from research, user testing, and market analysis to create truly user-centered designs

• Collaborate with a design manager, product manager, and cross-team peers throughout the product development life-cycle to iterate on and deliver a user experience that meets the highest quality bar

• Act as a quality control on the team and make sure documentations are in top shape before delivering to engineers and QAs

• Use a variety of metrics to analyze and continuously improve the user experience

• Mentor and provide design directions for senior, mid-level designers and associate designers

• Exercise ethical decision-making and do what’s best for our viewers

• Be the voice in the room that always puts the user first

Basic Qualifications:

• Minimum 7 years in Product Design at a technology company

• Minimum 1 year(s) of experience leading other designers either as a project lead or people manager

• Passion for evolving the design practice; it’s people, processes and tools

• Consulting skills to help stakeholders & partners uncover project goals, constraints & dependencies; and then guide them to optimal solutions

• A strong portfolio demonstrating both personal and team-based work

• A deep arsenal of design tools (Figma, Sketch, InVision, Framer, Mural, Keynote)

• Proficiency in user-centered design thinking methodologies

• Outstanding visual design aesthetics combined usable experiences that address problems

• A strong drive in overcoming obstacles to make a product successful

• An understanding of acquisition & conversion, data-informed design

• Experience with experimentation design (A/B, MVT, Usability, etc.)

• Be able to communicate directly with Product Managers, Stakeholders, and Developers to translate their visions and constraints, into beautiful, functional products that will delight our users

• Excellent prioritization and documentation skills

Education:

• Bachelor's degree required, MBA or technical degree preferred

The hiring range for this position in Glendale, CA and Bristol, CT is $138,900.00 to $186,200.00 per year and in New York is $145,400 to $195,000 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.