Lead Product and UX Designer

Who We Are

We’re a curious and humble group who loves to define the future and help build it. Curiosity and critique are key to our chemistry. We’re always looking for new skills, frameworks, and approaches to deliver the most meaningful product and service experiences. And we’re constantly pushing ourselves to experiment, explore and challenge assumptions. We bring that same passion for learning and improving to our clients: digging into their organizations, reframing their problem statements, and spending time with their users. This ensures we’re pushing our clients forward while designing valuable things people actually use.

Design at Table XI

Design matters to us. Design manifests possibility and gives us a glimpse of our future. It provides us a sense of purpose and guides our intent. Design is never about just an idea. It requires an understanding of its audience. Design is strategic. It generates value by driving deliverables, outcomes and recommendations. Design is bigger than a single skill set or discipline.

We design for resonance: to create change, and to make meaning. We aim to design product and service experiences that we are proud of—in a consistent and repeatable way. While there’s much more behind these five design principles, we believe they hold us accountable to each other, our clients, their users, and our own work:

1. Humanity

2. Curiosity

3. Clarity

4. Ingenuity

5. Quality

What We're Looking For

We’re looking for a Lead Designer, with a long-standing career in digital experiences, to bring strategic and creative vision to solving client challenges and user needs. Some designers fall in love with the solution, you fall in love with the problem. You’re not just interested in creating a beautiful design, you also possess a deep desire to ensure it exceeds client and user expectations. You’re flexible and earnest in your approach and understand the path to creating exceptional products is shaped with research, strategy, and technology. This is your chance to work with world-class humans, grow and share your skills, and create a lasting impact.

As a Lead Designer, we expect you to:

Lead projects, provide skills guidance, proactively learn and share, and mentor more junior team members
Produce high-quality UI and product designs. Everything you make should be intentional, expressive and visually precise.
Possess a solid understanding of interaction design principles with knowledge and experience in wireframing and prototyping.
See the forest and the trees. Designing great products is about being equally concerned with the big strategic objectives and the micro-interactions of the experience.
Understand the fundamentals of visual design and brand strategy—knowledge and experience in design systems, branding, typography, and color theory.
Lead design and usability testing with users. Observational research, conversational inquiry, and user testing are just a few of the methods you use to help clients develop empathy and make informed decisions.
Get tangible quickly. When in doubt, you create something for others to react and respond to.
Have experience in key industry tools, including Figma.

As a consultant, we expect you to:

Be an experienced consultant adept at building lasting, influential relationships with your clients and colleagues.
Develop and facilitate engaging workshops—leading and coaching groups of stakeholders through critical conversations and strategic exercises.
Provide defensible design rationale while remaining persuadable in light of new evidence and perspectives.
Help shape go-to-market strategies and product roadmaps for driving adoption and engagement.
Use storytelling and business case development to build conviction and align client stakeholders and leadership.
Scope complex programs—framing (and reframing) problem statements and opportunities.
Be a broad systems thinker capable of challenging orthodoxy and assumptions to help our clients take calculated risks.

As a teammate, we expect you to:

Work collaboratively on cross-functional teams of developers, designers, and business analysts—bridging capabilities and understanding between disciplines.
Be curious and humble—eager to learn from everyone, no matter their title or role.
Provide critical thinking and constructive feedback for improving the work while supporting your peers growth and development.
Have a strong command of design thinking and an understanding of how to design within the agile software development methodology: ability to understand customer-centric product requirements as features, epics, and user stories
Embrace the rapid, adaptive nature of the work and be comfortable with ambiguity.

What We Make

At Table XI, you’ll get exposure to many different people and projects. Our clients trust us as strategic partners—advising decisions that impact the long-term success of their organizations. We’ve helped:

Brink create an accessible voting education app to help all communities engage in the political process
Tyson Foods adopt design thinking to concept, prototype, and launch innovative products quickly
Northwestern University research facilities perform and advance clinical research
More than 25,000 people think big and participate in Chicago Ideas Week
A nonprofit understand what “belonging” means to their 200 global chapters
A homecare startup to connect caregivers with clients and their families
An IoT medical device manufacturer prototype hardware and software to help patients recover from spinal surgery
Families dealing with tragedy connect with resources and each other
Roger Ebert solidify his legacy as a film critic

But the work is just part of what makes Table XI a rewarding place to be. We support each others’ interests—whether volunteering with AIGA, organizing a UX Strategy Meetup, speaking at industry events, or learning new techniques and technologies. If there's something you're passionate about, we want you to pursue it so you can teach it to the rest of us. Our First Friday Design Talks, company Lunch & Learns, and weekly Design Practice Meetings are just some of the ways we create space for sharing, learning, and professional development.

What we offer

In COVID times, we’re all:

Working from home with a stipend for upgrades to your setup
Sheltering-in-place with zero travel or onsite client work
Communicating and collaborating with tools like Mural, Miro, Notion, Slack, and a lot of Zoom

Everyone on our team gets:

Equitable, competitive salary
Quality health insurance
Paid parental leave and flexible paid time off
401k plan, including employer matching
The option to work fully remote

We take equality seriously.

Table XI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is committed to equal opportunity employment without regard to race, religion, color, gender (including gender identity, change of sex and transgender status), sexual orientation, age, disability, ancestry, national origin, military or veteran status, marital status, genetic information or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.