Head of Product Design

Description

Product Design at Noisy Creek shapes the look, feel, and voice readers meet across our sites — The Stranger, Portland Mercury, Chicago Reader,  — and in every newsletter we send. As we grow into new markets, we need a technical design leader to bring consistency, craft, and a strong point of view to the experience readers, members, and advertisers have with us across web, email, and — soon — mobile app.

Our Product Design leader will own end-to-end user experience (UX) and visual design direction across our digital properties: websites, email/marketing templates, and future mobile app work. This is a hands-on leadership role — you'll set design vision and standards for a multi-brand, multi-market publisher while staying close enough to the work to design a page template, refine an email system, or prototype a mobile concept yourself.

You'll partner with editorial, membership, advertising, and product leaders to ensure design serves both readers and the business, work directly with engineering to ship your designs, and engage at the C-suite level to establish design as a company-wide priority.

• Define and own the UX/visual design vision for Noisy Creek's digital properties, building a cohesive design language that flexes across brands while preserving each publication's voice.
• Own end-to-end website design — information architecture, interaction, visual design, and responsive behavior — from concept to shipped experience.
• Design and maintain the system for email templates and marketing formats (newsletters, membership, ticketing, promotions), ensuring consistency and deliverability across markets.
• Lead early-stage design exploration for future mobile app initiatives, from concept through user testing.
• Build and maintain a scalable design system and component library so a small team can ship consistent, on-brand work across properties.
• Partner with engineering to translate designs into shipped product, and with product, editorial, membership, and advertising leaders to align design with business goals like growth, conversion, and retention.
• Conduct or commission user research and usability testing to validate and iterate on design decisions.
• Establish and maintain accessibility, usability, and brand standards across all digital touchpoints.
• Build the case for growing a design function over time, then hire, mentor, and manage that team as it's approved.

• 7+ years of UX/product design experience, including owning end-to-end design for a consumer-facing product at scale.
• A strong portfolio spanning web and email/marketing design, ideally with early-stage mobile app work.
• Experience building or evolving a design system used across multiple products or brands.
• Experience partnering directly with engineers from concept to shipped product, with fluency in implementation constraints.
• Strong communication skills, including presenting and defending design decisions to executive leadership.
• Experience conducting or commissioning user research to inform design decisions.
• Comfort with autonomy in a lean, fast-moving org — equally strategic and hands‑on.

• Experience designing for media, publishing, membership/subscription, or email marketing at scale.
• Experience designing across multiple brands or a multi‑tenant design system.
• People management experience, or a track record of building the case for a team before it exists.
• Experience as a sole/first design hire, standing up process and craft standards from scratch.
• Familiarity with WCAG accessibility standards and email rendering constraints across clients.
• Seattle location preferred, not required.

• Comprehensive Health Coverage: Noisy Creek provides employer‑subsidized premiums for medical, dental, and vision…