About Homeward

Buying a home should be an exciting milestone. But all too often, it’s stressful, especially in a competitive market or when you’re buying and selling at the same time. So we’re redesigning the homebuying experience. We’re a fast-paced real estate startup that empowers agents to help homebuyers buy with cash. We buy homes on behalf of our partners’ clients with our cash, then the client buys the home back from us.

Founder and CEO Tim Heyl, a 10-year industry veteran and owner of one of the fastest-growing agent teams in the country, started Homeward in 2018. In fact, he bought our first customer’s home with his own life savings. Today we offer two services — Buy with cash and Buy before you sell.

We’ve raised more than $160MM in equity capital from top-tier venture investors, including Norwest, Blackstone Alternative Asset Management, Adams Street, Javelin, and LiveOak. Our leadership team includes experts from the real estate, mortgage, and technology industries.

About the Opportunity

We’re seeking a Director of Product Design to help us build a simpler, more customer-centric home buying and selling experience.  This role will be leading a team of 4 designers to start with future expectations of hiring and structuring a high-performing design org. Reporting directly to our SVP, Product, this role will be responsible for developing and evangelizing a vision and roadmap for design & user experience strategy at Homeward to turn the complex process into a simple, digital led experience.

This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship.

In this role, you will:

• Contribute to our overarching product vision, strategy, and roadmap by partnering closely with product management & engineering leadership.
• Identify the design capabilities needed to accomplish our organizational goals and lead a small, high-performing team to execute them.
• Roll up your sleeves and be hands-on as a player-coach to move quickly to deliver business results whether that’s with user interviews, survey development, workflow analysis, or mocking up features - you’re comfortable doing it all.
• Work closely with our product management, engineering, analyst, and operation teams to intimately understand the business & design the right user experiences to accomplish business goals
• Assess the tradeoffs between various approaches to delivering solutions and be able to clearly communicate the rationale behind that decision.
• Lead the development of our emerging design system to ensure a consistent user experience across our various applications.
• Seek feedback and coordinated launch efforts with every segment of the organization from Operations to Customer Service to Finance.
• Analyze what competitors are doing in the space to differentiate and distinguish our experience.

What you’ll bring:

• 8+ years experience designing and building simple, user-centric systems while optimizing for delivering value as quickly as possible.
• 3+ years of managing teams in a high-growth organization while still being hands on.
• Experience delivering within the complex environment of tech-enabled professional services 
• You apply analytic rigor to business problems combined with a deep empathy for users and value outcomes-focused initiatives
• You’ve designed, launched and iterated on multiple responsive web apps and features, and have a portfolio to share with our team.
• Demonstrable mockup and prototype skills using industry standard tools such as Figma
• Expert skills in conducting user interviews, user experience tests, and survey research
• Expert qualitative and quantitative analysis skills
• You’re a team player with enthusiasm about helping beyond the bounds of your day-to-day role and a high degree of flexibility and coachability
• You’re interested in improving the complex, emotional process of buying and selling a home and making it the exciting milestone in people’s lives that it deserves to be.
• Demonstrated experience leading a small, tight-knit, high-performing Data team and partnering effectively with Product Engineering & the broader organization to drive business results.

Our ValuesTHE GOLDEN RULE

Whether we’re dealing with colleagues or customers, we follow The Golden Rule, treating others the way we want to be treated. It’s a simple rule, but it’s also significant: we don’t prioritize money or growth over people, and we practice empathy at every opportunity.

CALM FOCUS

We work in tech and build solutions for real estate. Both are fast-paced and stressful industries. So it’s important that  we focus on the larger objective rather than rushing from one task to the next. If something is out of scope, we say “No.” If something feels rushed, we pump the brakes. This calm focus helps us create solutions our customers love.

ONE TEAM, ONE DREAM

Big problems require big solutions. We look at our customers’ experience holistically, and recognize that solving them requires collaboration across teams. This approach extends to cooperation among our three affiliate companies — Homeward, Homeward Mortgage and Homeward Title — and produces  a more integrated homebuying experience.