Lead Designer

ABOUT FLOWN

Even before COVID, working in open-plan offices full of distractions was not the best environment for producing our best work. Studies show that our best productivity and creativity comes when you get a chance to do 'deep work' - uninterrupted focused time working on something significant. Post-COVID, the need for places to work ergonomically away from your office - either as an individual or as a team - is even greater. FLOWN is the first global brand seeking to provide the ideal physical and mental spaces for us to think and work more creatively and productively.

FLOWN will offer a marketplace of spaces suitable for individuals or teams to get away from their day-to-day to concentrate, contemplate or collaborate. We'll offer not only physical spaces - think Airbnb for Work - but mental spaces through our app and online services. Available to individuals and companies as a subscription, to be offered as an accompaniment or replacement to traditional office rental.

FLOWN is led by successful serial entrepreneur, Alicia Navarro, founder of Skimlinks (acquired by Connexity April 2020), and backed well-known entrepreneurs and angels such as Greg Marsh (OneFineStay), Taavet Hinrikus (Transferwise), Tom Allason (Shutl). FLOWN is seeking to create social impact by democratisating access to the kind of spaces that can best unleash our human potential, so we can not only solve real global problems but also live more meaningful lives.

ABOUT THE ROLE

One of FLOWN's core values is a deep appreciation for good design and easeful flow, and its importance in imbuing moments with delight, beauty, ease, and clarity. We are seeking a Lead Designer to create these customer touchpoints, and make the FLOWN brand synonymous with these values.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Here's some of things you'll be responsible for:

Lead the design function at FLOWN.
Work with our CEO to define, design and create the features of the FLOWN platform.
Create and rapidly iterate prototypes at various levels of fidelity, turning ideas and concepts from sketches and wireframes into development-ready specifications .
Design additional graphic user interface elements needed to enrich our existing design system.
Turn low-fidelity wireframes into rich, appealing hi-fidelity designs.
Design the user interface and user experience of all features and interactions with our website and platform.
Work closely with our Tech team to ensure they have all the designs, specifications and assets needed to develop our software productively.
Organise and project managing the product design and development process.
Understand and map out our use cases, user personas, and various customer journeys.
Create assets and technical specifications that enable the successful development of features.
Manage and enrich our platform design system and asset library.
Monitor and analyse our site's data and user interactions, in order to provide product and feature recommendations (across all teams), and to continuously evolve our designs to improve usability, delight and engagement.
Ensure the FLOWN brand design is consistently represented across all the work we produce, from decks to documents to interface design to customer collateral.
Stay abreast of competitors, other great visual brands, new trends, and best practices in order to bring this perspective into your rationale for features, design concepts and UX decisions.
Oversee the design of our illustrations, printable collateral (e.g. brochures, property guides, proposals), advertisements (e.g. social media ads, Tube ads), and merchandise/equipment branding. Source and manage freelance designers to deliver these tasks as required (e.g. additional designers, illustrators etc).

REQUIREMENTS

We think you’ll need the following experience in order to succeed in the role:

3+ years of experience as a UI/UX designer.
Experience with both visual/graphic design experience alongside wireframing & user flows.
Competence using Sketch and/or Figma.
Exposure designing for both B2C and B2B SaaS products advantageous.
Experience with online and offline ad design, as well as printed and/or physical product design advantageous (or comfortable briefing freelancers to do this).
Experience working within an early-stage business is preferable.
Sourcing and managing freelancers.

In addition, here are the core attributes we think you'll need to succeed in the role:

Creative, passionate, a strong aesthetic, and sound judgement - you create unique, beautiful, clean and engaging designs. You are excited by our mission and use this passion to create user experiences that will drive value. You are the champion of what good looks like, and you use this skill to make wise empathetic decisions, and to guide others in the same way.
Collaborative - you understand that product design touches upon all teams, as well as our members and hosts. You proactively and constructively share your opinions, plans and insights with team members, and you regularly solicit the views and needs of others - be they internal team members or users of FLOWN.
Product mindset - you understand how to observe and extract information about what customers want from a product. You use these insights to evolve our product and its UI in a way that keeps them happy, engaged, and retained.
Organised and resilient - you thrive in a fast-paced team, prioritise a busy workload, juggle multiple tasks, and work to quick-turnaround deadlines. You are unfazed when there's a lot on your plate or curveballs are thrown your way.

BENEFITS

We want to practice what we preach, and build a company and team that works creatively and productively. Here are some of the benefits you'll gain from this role:

Scope and influence - you're joining the founding team and will be involved in shaping our product, what we do, and how we work.
A focus on deep work - we exist to support deep work among our members, so we support our staff in developing their own distraction-free deep work practice.
A strong team - we are led by a proven CEO & Founder, and the rest of the team is equally highly experienced. We also have a high-calibre of investors with a good amount of runway.
Fully dispersed, flexible working - we are a remote-first company, and we've got lots of perks, tools and processes to make sure that works for everyone. We encourage individuals to establish working hours that enable them to work as productively as possible, and we understand that everyone needs a work/life balance.
Team socials - we get together regularly to collaborate and have fun. We also embed virtual activities and other surprises into our working days