Product Designer (US Only)

Location: Brooklyn, NY or remote within the US

Target Start Date: February, 2022

Salary Range: $80,000 - $91,000 (Offers will vary based on experience and location-based cost-of-living calculations)

Benefits: Vision, dental, & medical insurance; 403(b) retirement savings plan; generous vacation policy; parental leave; long-term disability; employee assistance program

Seniority Level: Mid

Supervisory role:  N

Organizational overview

At Democracy Works, we believe voting should fit the way we live. To that end, we build technology for both voters and election administrators that simplifies the process and ensures that no voter should ever have to miss an election.

• TurboVote is a tool designed to help voters register, request their ballot, and make their voice heard in every election, from local to national. We’ve connected over ten million Americans with TurboVote by building the largest college, nonprofit, and corporate voter engagement coalition in the country, including more than 300 campuses, nonprofits - like Headcount, Color of Change, and the Hispanic Federation--and companies like Starbucks, Univision, Facebook, Google, and Snap. 

• As the only comprehensive official election dataset, the Voting Information Project (VIP) helps Americans find their polling site and available ballot dropbox locations where they look for it most: online. Across Google products alone, our ballot dropbox and polling place data were viewed nearly 500 million times in 2020. 

• How To Vote breaks down all the options each state offers for voting, their voter registration rules, as well as unique circumstances like voting overseas and voting rights restoration for the formerly incarcerated. Across Google products alone, our How to Vote guides were promoted over 2 billion times in 2020.

• Our tool Ballot Scout brings transparency and accountability to the vote-by-mail process by allowing elections administrators and voters to track every ballot with the same ease as an Amazon package. Ballot Scout helps election administrators track absentee ballots through the mail, providing transparency in the vote-by-mail process and making it easier to follow up when things go awry.

• Co-founded by Democracy Works and the CAA Foundation, Civic Alliance is a nonpartisan group of businesses working together to build a future where everyone participates in shaping our country. In 2020, membership grew to 1,030 companies with an employee reach of 5,163,938.

Where you fit in

You’ll be joining our Government Initiatives team at an exciting moment: we’re focused on maximizing our ability to share clear, accurate data via an intuitive dashboard for our partners and building new features to allow election officials to better manage elections. However, we need help with ensuring that our interfaces are serving our users as best as we can. As the Product Designer working on Ballot Scout, you will be working end-to-end — from proposing new features and designs to the team based on user feedback or research, to drafting cards and planning sprint goals, to ensuring product quality through the use of design reviews on new functionality. In doing so, you’ll be supported by a small but capable team of engineers, program and support staff with significant experience supporting election officials from all over the country.

You will

• Develop deep knowledge of USPS mail tracking specifications and monitor USPS technical updates in order to ensure tool remains up-to-date

• Collaborate with Program/Support staff to analyze feedback from election officials and voters to find inspiration for tool edits, new features, designs and interfaces

• Lead on drafting user stories and feature specifications and wireframe new user flows and features.

• Collaborate with technical lead to define implementation for new features, ensure clear conditions of acceptance, and take part in regular sprint-planning meetings with the engineering team to prioritize work

• Ensure product quality through the use of UX / design review during the development of new features

• Define and maintain clear style guides for product use

• Ensure that our interfaces are WCAG 2.0 compliant, welcoming to users of all abilities, and thoroughly responsive

• Research and analyze competitor tools and collaborate with Program/Support staff in reviewing legislation and RFPs to ensure tool remains competitive

You are

• Empathetic, comfortable acting as users’ biggest advocate

• A fantastic listener

• Attentive to detail

• A great communicator, able to communicate your vision to both technical and non-technical audiences

• Creative, in the way that can pare ideas down to a clear wireframe and user-flow

You have experience

• 3+ years working in a product management or design role in a technical setting

• Drafting robust project requirements, whether solo or in collaboration with a technical team

• Wireframing and prototyping new designs using Figma, Sketch, Invision, Adobe’s creative suite and/or other similar tools.

• Communicating across different areas of expertise

• Writing clear material on complex subjects

• Designing for responsive and mobile interfaces

• Creating and maintaining style guides for web applications

Physical demands

This position requires regular, daily use of a computer to conduct work and communicate with colleagues.

Social expectations 

You'll be expected to attend a good number of meetings including weekly team meetings, bi-weekly sprint planning meetings, weekly 1:1s with your supervisor, weekly sprint check-in meetings, and weekly org-wide all hands meetings. 

Travel expectations 

Democracy Works’s regular operating hours are 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. Eastern time, and all employees are expected to be available and working during regular operating hours, whether or not they are physically located in New York and/or working out of the Brooklyn office.

Two times per year, all full-time staff members participate in a five day retreat in our Brooklyn offices. All Staff is held each year in May and November, when we are able to safely do so. Post-pandemic, there may be occasional travel to conduct user research, liaise with our partners or attend conferences to represent Democracy Works and/or for personal development.

Application Instructions

To apply, please send a resume and respond to the following questions (instead of a cover letter) using the form below.

In your responses, please include only the following information:

• What are your pronouns?

• How did you find this job listing?

• Why are you interested in this role and working at Democracy Works?

• Democracy Works values diversity in its teams. Why is it important to you to work on a diverse team? How do you communicate a nonpartisan voice while balancing your passion for a cause?

• What is one product or significant feature that you have managed/owned as a part of a team and why was it significant (either officially or unofficially)? 

• How many combined years of experience do you have working on a product management and/or product design team?

• Are you authorized to work lawfully in the United States for Democracy Works?

As part of our application, you’ll see an optional form used to collect EEOC demographic information. The data collected in this form is useful in our EEOC reporting and in our assessment of our recruitment practices. However, please keep in mind that the standardized EEOC language used in this form does not reflect the values of Democracy Works--for example, we don’t view gender as binary. We also encourage all applicants to state their pronouns when applying for any job opening at Democracy Works. 

Democracy Works is committed to diversity and inclusion in everything we do and aspires to have a team that's representative of the voters we serve. When hiring, we practice proactive outreach to top talent that’s underrepresented in our sector. We conduct an anonymized skills evaluation, to reduce implicit bias and resume-dependency in our process. We're a woman- and gay-founded nonprofit, and promote an inclusive culture that stands against racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism (to name a few). To be explicit, we strongly encourage applicants of all races, ethnicities, political party associations, religions (or lack thereof), national origins, sexual orientations, genders, sexes, ages, abilities, and branches of military service. 

Democracy Works follows the I-9 requirements of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Immigration sponsorship is not available for this position, and you must possess your own work authorization in the U.S. now and in the future to continue working in this position.

Feel free to contact work@democracy.works if you have any questions about our commitment to inclusion or about general hiring practices, or if you need an accommodation for a medical condition during the hiring process. Democracy Works posts all current career opportunities at democracy.works/careers.