Principal Product Designer - Services & Performance (REMOTE)

At DICK’S Sporting Goods, we believe in how positively sports can change lives. On our team, everyone plays a critical role in creating confidence and excitement by personally equipping all athletes to achieve their dreams.  We are committed to creating an inclusive and diverse workforce, reflecting the communities we serve.

If you are ready to make a difference as part of the world’s greatest sports team, apply to join our team today!

OVERVIEW:

Welcome to Product Design at DICK’S Sporting Goods, where we specialize in delivering retail excellence along every aspect of the customer journey driven through Technology. Our mission focuses on crafting intuitive, easy-to-use products that span across our business. We are looking for a new team member who can enable human-centered practices that inspire, innovate, and deliver elevated experiences for our customers and products.

This role supports our newly formed Athlete Experience initiative, focused on delivering end-to-end omni experiences purposefully designed for Athletes to strengthen their relationship with DICK’S now and in the future. More specifically, you will work within the Services & Performance Activation Squad, an interdisciplinary team focused beyond the sales floor, through service and performance offerings that drive greater engagement and improvement in sport.

As a Principal Product Designer, you will lead the end-to-end experience strategy within the scope of the Services & Performance Squad. You will take ownership of the Athlete and Teammate journeys, working closely with cross-functional partners to gather insights, identify opportunities, and design industry-leading experiences that deliver significant business value.

As a Principal Product Designer, you will lead the design efforts for highly complex programs that span across multiple portfolios and/or products. In this role, you enable the delivery of product experiences rooted in human-centered principles that support program-level strategic priorities. Your influence and expertise enable you to promote the value of design as you continue to build partnerships in support of the program you are working on. As a design leader, you provide direct oversight in the organization and delivery of high-quality products within specific product teams. Focus areas may include:

Human-Centered Advocate
Expanding teammate understanding and application of human-centered design, stakeholder exposure and involvement to critical HCD activities, and finding creative ways to influence HCD across multiple products

Evidence & Risk
Guiding teammates on how to avoid extensive research practices through design maturity; understanding that the nature of the evidence needed will parallel the nature of the risk presented to the customer and/or the business

Discovery
Guiding teammates through a process rooted in problem solving frameworks, where they leverage mixed-methods research to support identification and understanding of users (and systems), journeys, and top problems.

Experimentation
Learning is a critical part of your design philosophy, which allows teams to create ways to validate the effectiveness of the experience pre-launch through experimentation, prototype testing, A/B testing, usability testing, and so forth.

Data-Driven
Guiding teammates on how to leverage mixed methods data insights to drive decision making

Development
This is where everything comes together as your teams commit to delivering an end-to-end experience. Product designers leverage Homefield, our in-house design system, to communicate and pair with software engineers throughout the development process.

Feedback
You provide the appropriate forums to seek feedback and understanding amongst your teams, stakeholders, and leadership in order to aggregate and activate this feedback in meaningful ways.

Leadership & People Management
You are expanding your capabilities in leadership by providing design oversight within specific product teams involved in the program you are leading. Although you do not have direct reports, you are actively involved with designers regarding the strategy, planning, and execution for the program.

QUALIFICATIONS:

Candidates for this role should have:

• Advanced understanding of Product Design

• Understanding or experience with Service Design and/or Experience Design a plus

• Experience defining journey maps and/or service blueprints to define end-to-end customer experiences spanning multiple products, channels, and teams

• Superior knowledge and application of Scrum, lean Product Management and human-centered design practices

• Success in defining cohesive research and design strategies

• Expert written and verbal comm skills that result in effective relationship building

• Effective management, facilitation and collaboration skills to drive alignment across organizational peers and complex stakeholder groups

• Proven ability to influence cross-functional teams & senior leadership stakeholders without formal authority

• Experience with enterprise projects or highly complex strategic initiatives across multiple portfolios, products, and channels

• Success in defining short- & long-term strategies, visions & launching excellent products

• Curious attitude and desire to learn

• Superior knowledge and application of problem-solving frameworks/methodologies

• Understanding of software development lifecycle

• Ability to coach teammates on complex problem-solving frameworks, concepts or methodologies

• Can quickly and effectively resolve conflict

• Can effectively provide decision making as a service

• An ability to advocate for research and Design Thinking practices at all levels

• Demonstrated coaching techniques to enable teammates without direct management responsibilities

• Ability to cross-functionally organize, motivate and mobilize teams towards working on a common goal

• Indirect or direct management experience, leading a group of teams towards the same goal

• Portfolio of work, demonstrating a human-centered design process

Scope – Where you operate within the Product Design organization

• This role is an Individual Contributor leadership role - no direct reports

• Expert within the product design craft

• Advanced understanding of Scrum and Agile

• Senior technical expert within the portfolio

• Works on high complexity, high criticality enterprise initiatives

• Principals can span across multiple portfolios for enterprise initiatives

• Oversees interns & special assignments as required

• Critical in talent assessments and recruiting

• An advocate within the Product Design Community of Practice

• Represents Product Design on the planning teams (accountable for annual and quarterly planning at the enterprise level)

• High organizational agility

Job Duties & Responsibilities

Leadership – How you expand your influence through strategy, decision making, coaching, and management

The Principal Product Designer does not manage people, but is actively involved with designers regarding the strategy, planning, and execution for highly complex programs spanning across multiple portfolios and/or products. Leading highly complex program initiatives, the Principal Product Designer is responsible for:

• Using evidence-based influencing skills

• Conducting stakeholder identification workshops and create stakeholder map by product

• Facilitating stakeholder engagement and interactions for HCD enablement

• Translating stakeholder knowledge into inputs to discovery

• Improving business proficiency through partnership with stakeholders

• Actively coaching and mentoring other product designers and cross-functional peers

• Coaching Product Design competencies, skillsets and profiles

• Being an active member in the community of practice

Strategy – How you understand and plan within a product team that solves customer problems and drives market impact

The Principal Product Designer does not manage people, but is actively involved with designers regarding the strategy, planning, and execution for highly complex programs spanning across multiple portfolios and/or products. Leading highly complex program initiatives, the Principal Product Designer is responsible for:

• Understanding the macro-level journey across the initiative and cross-team dependencies

• Ability to define end-to-end experiences across touchpoints, channels, and products

• Strong storytelling skill set

• Design Thinking methodologies

• Conducting and/or guiding research discovery to define problems

• Applying mixed methods research practices

• Identifying the right problems using problem discovery frameworks

• Prioritizing problems to be solved

• Testing and learning through lean experimentation

• Leveraging data and analytics to inform design strategy, in partnership with Data and Analytics partners

• Following industry trends and retail concepts that can inspire innovative product thinking

• Building partnerships with internal research teams (Athlete Insights, Data & Analytics, etc.)

• Understanding the macro-level journey across the program, and cross-team dependencies

• Effectively explaining 'why' discovery / experimentation are needed

• Defining the discovery strategy in support of the program

• Identifying new product opportunities within the portfolio

• Supporting the creation and implementation of the portfolio strategy

Execution – How you support and provide oversight to the design and delivery of solutions to our customers

The Principal Product Designer does not manage people, but is actively involved with designers regarding the strategy, planning, and execution for highly complex programs spanning across multiple portfolios and/or products. Leading highly complex program initiatives, the Principal Product Designer is responsible for:

• Collaborating with Product Designs on product teams to deliver highly-effective designs across the product ecosystem

• Utilizing visual design principles applied to UI design

• Demonstrating a customer-centric view into developing great product experiences and the ability to advocate on a customer's behalf

• Leveraging Homefield to create UI designs

• Participating in sprint planning to support research / design / development

• Gathering feedback to inform behavioral trends

• Monitoring metrics to understand usage trends

• Building discovery objectives and goals in collaboration with key stakeholders

• Combining quantitative + qualitative data to tell the story of the product

• Improving data proficiency through partnership with the D&A team

Services

• Mentor / Coach

• Design Community Presence

• Recruiting & Hiring Support

• Program Strategy HCD

• Influence the Practice of HCD

• Negotiation Skills

• Research Synthesis

• Relationship Building & Networking

• Data Gathering

• Interviewing

• Observational HCD Activities

• Shadowing (empathy building)

• Mentee Senior Leadership Skill Building

• Workshop Facilitation

• Competitive Shopping & Research Travel

• Experimentation Planning & Implementation

• Data Analytics

• Storytelling (program level)

Deliverables

• Macro-level journeys maps and/or service blueprints

• Storytelling artifacts (e.g., presentations, videos, etc)

• Research Plan

• Stakeholder Map

• Customer and User Segments, Profiles, & Personas

• Athlete / Teammate Business Outcome Statements

• Usability Testing Script

• Heuristic Evaluation

• Design System Libraries (wireframes, prototypes, UI design)

• Inclusive Design Considerations

• Service Blueprinting

• Interview Guide

• Competitive Analysis

• Athlete Value Statement

• Site / Information Architecture

• Survey Design

• Problem & Solution Identification

• Stakeholder Updates / Demo

• Domain(s), New Teammate (or Intern) On-Boarding

• Instructional design, video on-boarding, and build-kits

• Touchbase / Performance Tracking

• External Design Workshops or Speaking Engagements

• Adapting Specialized Design Skills / Practices In-House