UX Designer (Product) - Q2 2024

About Planning Center

At Planning Center, we build powerful web and mobile applications for churches. Each of our eight products has a dedicated team of designers and developers committed to refining and expanding that product in response to real customer needs. Our customers include many of the largest churches in the country, as well as tens of thousands of small community churches—we strive to make day-to-day operations easier for all of them.

About the Work

UX Designers play a critical role in shaping the digital experiences that Planning Center users interact with daily. They bridge the gap between aesthetics and functionality, ensuring that products not only look good but also provide meaningful and enjoyable experiences for users. We’re seeking a UX/UI designer with expertise in product design to support our team in improving Planning Center software. The ideal candidate will be well-versed in visual design, UX best practices, and able to communicate effectively about the design process.

The UX/UI Designer reports to the UX Design Manager and is part of a centralized UX Design team. In this role, you can expect to:

• Take ownership of your projects and craft a design strategy for our suite of products.
• Collaborate across multiple teams and with your team of fellow designers. This includes working with Product Managers, Product Designers, Support, and Marketing.
• Advocate for our customers by crafting user experiences that are simple and intuitive.
• Contribute patterns and recommendations to our design system to promote consistency across products.

Who We Look For

The best fits for any role on the Planning Center team are people embodying our Core Values:

• Engage with Humility - We actively participate with openness and receptiveness. We are ready to listen, learn, and speak thoughtfully and kindly—regardless of skill level, expertise, or place on the org chart.
• Invest in our team - We give our time and energy to our team’s success—improving collaboration with effective communication, making space for diverse perspectives, sharing knowledge, and asking questions.
• Do Our Best Work - We aspire to do our best possible work—continually looking for ways to improve the quality of our individual output and contribute to our team's overall success and growth.
• Focus on Customer Impact - We advocate for our customer’s best interests in our decision-making—we can trace the goal of every project back to creating positive value for our customers.
• Think Holistically, Work Iteratively - We focus on taking practical steps towards our goals with an awareness of the broader context—thinking big, working small.

We believe the strongest teams comprise people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, and we are committed to cultivating that diversity here at Planning Center. We're building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do your best work.

The Hiring Process

During the hiring process, you’ll have a chance to interact with several members of our team. We strongly encourage you to bring any questions you have to anybody you interact with. You’re interviewing us as much as we’re interviewing you.

The teammates you’ll encounter along the way:

• Our Recruiting and Growth Strategist
• Several designers from the Product Design Team
• The UX Design Manager you'll report to

Applications will be accepted until 9AM PST on June 13th, 2024. We aim to make a final decision by 3PM PST on July 11th, 2024. Our hiring process will be delayed from July 15th to July 26th, so a start date be roughly July 30th, 2024.

Below is an outline of the steps in our hiring process.

• Step one: Apply with a resume, cover letter, and portfolio. Your cover letter should speak directly to your interest in this position. We want to know what got you into design, how your experience has set you up for success in this role, and why you want to join our team. Applicants without a portfolio will not be considered.
  
  (A word of caution for those using AI cover letters: When compared to the hundreds of other candidates who did the exact same thing, it becomes painfully obvious who took the AI first draft. If you're going to use these tools, we ask that you use them well. Please give our recruiter something a bit more human to read.)
  
• Step two: Initial phone call with our recruiter so we can get to know one another
• Step three: An online design exercise to assess your design prowess and get a rough understanding of your experience and skills
• Step four: Interview over Zoom with the Product Design Manager and a few of our designers
• Step five: Pending all goes well, an offer

Requirements

For Hiring

• Full-time resident in the United States
• Eligible to work in the United States

For the work itself

• An impressive portfolio of UX Case studies and visual UI design work.
• Previous experience designing interfaces and interactions for a web-based product.
• Strong sense of composition, UI design, and UX best practices.
• Knowledge of accessibility concerns and designing for a wide range of stress cases.
• Proficiency with design tools. We use Figma as our preferred UI/prototyping tool. Experience with comparable tools like Sketch, and XD will also be considered.
• Experience shepherding a project through the cycles of discovery, ideation, testing, and iteration.
• Clear verbal and written communication and the aptitude for writing design specifications.
• Invested - We care about the products we create and the people we create them for, and we all contribute to the vision and direction of our products. Every one of our designers is critical to their team.
• Curious - We aren’t afraid to ask questions, experiment, and iterate. We also love playing with fun new technologies & processes, and we take time every few months to do just that.
• Humble - We always seek opportunities to grow and learn from one another.

Benefits

We love our team. It’s one of the core pillars we work off of every day, which is why we take care of you as best we can. Here are a few highlights, but you can find all of our benefits here.

Get paid

We pay in the top 10% of the New York City rates (no matter where you live), contribute to your 401k, provide a charitable giving match of up to $2,000 a year, have a generous allowance for continued education, and offer a co-working stipend. The annual salary range for this position is $125,111 – $160,857.

Get out

Enjoy paid Fridays off in the summer, every other Friday off the rest of the year, a month-long sabbatical every five years, one week off between Christmas and New Years, one week off each year to serve with a non-profit, and two weeks paid vacation each year, increasing to three over time.

Be healthy

Generous paid sick time, $200 monthly for physical fitness and mental health, 95% medical and 100% dental premium health coverage.