Senior Director - Product Design

Job 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. 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.&#xa0; • 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.&#xa0; • 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.&#xa0; 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).&#xa0; • 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. • Experience: 15 years in product design, with at least 5 years managing managers and senior ICs (Principal, Sr.Staff level).&#xa0; • 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.&#xa0; • Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Design, HCI, Computer Science, or a related field. </u