Head of Product Design

ROLE OVERVIEW

As the Head of Product Design, you will play a crucial role in shaping the future of the Benchling product experience. You will be responsible for leading our design team, setting the vision for product design, and ensuring that our products are not only functional but also delightful and intuitive for our users. You will work closely with cross-functional leaders across Product Management, Engineering, and Go-To-Market teams to ship impactful, world-class products.

This is a hybrid role, based in our San Francisco office, and requires in-office presence at least 3x per week.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Lead, mentor, and inspire a team of talented designers, fostering a culture of creativity, collaboration, and excellence.
• Define and communicate a clear vision for the product experience, driving alignment with the company’s strategic goals.
• Serve as the voice of the user to inspire Benchlings through customer stories and champion user-centered design principles, ensuring that user needs and feedback are at the forefront of the design process.
• Collaborate with product management and engineering to prioritize design initiatives and ensure timely delivery of high-quality design solutions.
• Promote continued learning on the design team and stay current with industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices to continually enhance the design team’s capabilities.

How You’ll Succeed:

• Beyond practicing empathy with our customers, you have the curiosity to gain subject matter expertise and understanding of the needs of users and buyers in the fast-changing and technically complex fields of biotechnology and chemistry.
• You’ll inspire the team to question assumptions and validate hypotheses, identify cross-product overlaps to approach as one solution, and creatively work to solve complex scientific workflow and data management problems.
• You will advocate for and drive cultural change around design thinking / design led product development. You will partner with the Head of Product to drive healthy, collaborative relationships between designers and product managers that achieve great outcomes for our customers.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), or a related field.
• Proven experience (10+ years min) in product design, with a significant portion in a leadership role.
• Demonstrated track record of leading teams to deliver successful, user-centered design solutions.
• Excellent understanding of design principles, methodologies, and tools.
• Strong advocate for user research and data-driven decision making.
• Exceptional communication and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate design concepts and decisions to various stakeholders.
• Ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on design work.
• Familiarity with biotech and/or the scientific software industry is a plus.

SALARY RANGE

Benchling takes a market-based approach to pay. The candidate's starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and work location. For this role the base salary range is $250,000 - $350,000.

Total Compensation includes the following:

• Competitive salary and equity
• Broad range of medical, dental, and vision plans for employees and their dependents
• Fertility healthcare and family-forming benefits
• Four months of fully paid parental leave
• 401(k) + Employer Match
• Commuter benefits for in-office employees and a generous home office set up stipend for remote employees
• Mental health benefits, including therapy and coaching, for employees and their dependents
• Monthly Wellness stipend
• Learning and development stipend
• Generous and flexible vacation
• Company-wide Summer & Winter holiday shutdown
• Sabbaticals for 5-year and 10-year anniversaries

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