Job description
LawnStarter is the nation’s leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and related services, crossing $100M in bookings last year. And lawn care is only the beginning - our vision is to become the one-stop shop for all home services.
Design Director
As a Design Director at LawnStarter, you will be leading our path to a 5-star customer experience. This is a position with high autonomy in which you will set the vision and processes related to our user research, branding, product design. With a current small team of 4 members, you will need to be able to navigate between strategic decision making, people management, and operational work. This is a high leverage role, with exposure to our entire leadership team and responsibility to drive results.
Problems to be solved
Your main responsibility will be to improve our customer experience,collaborating to ensure we are providing great solutions to the right problems. In order to do that, you will need to prioritize and solve challenges, which we have plenty of, such as:
Design as a value driver: We are a technology company that partners with local pros to deliver local services. This means a great user experience depends on UI design but also on service design, incentives design, and so much more. It’s an intricate business and every detail has ripple effects that are often hard to predict and even harder without great design practices and product taste. We are also a small team, with just 4 designers (your team), to cover a lot of surface area. How can we set a high bar for what’s a great user experience? How can we get every designer and every initiative to hit that bar? How can we do that while moving fast? What tools, processes, libraries, AI workflows, etc, can we leverage in order to move faster and better?
Understand customers and pros: We believe delighting consumers starts with deeply understanding them. Currently, we have spread out efforts to understand our customers across the organization, with no central repository or method to institutionalize learnings. How can we systematize learning about our customers and pros? How can we ensure that interviews, surveys, and other research methods are being applied with best practices in mind?
Multi-brand strategy: We currently own three brands - LawnStarter, Lawn Love, and HomeGnome, and might not stop there. This allows us to increase our marketing reach while offering slightly different versions of the same product. How do we ensure alignment between what we market, how we present it, and what we deliver, for each brand? How do we ensure a good balance between brands complementing each other while not competing too much with each other? Customers can feel when a brand is not well rounded, with promises that don’t match delivery, and it impacts retention, referrals and overall image.
Experience: You have 7+ years of experience in design at technology companies and at least a few years of leadership experience. Bonus if you have a diverse design experience w/ product and service design, and user research.
Team builder: You are ready to lead and develop exceptional people, helping them be their best selves. You create an environment where people are excited about achieving more each day, with intellectual honesty and trust across the team.
Learning Mindset: You take pride in understanding problems deeply and asking the right questions. You can absorb a variety of topics with extreme ease, having a structured and logical approach to developing your understanding of the business and its challenges. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you have a preconceived system of processes and methods and plan on just applying them without first learning all the ways our business is unique.
Excellence: You set extremely high standards for yourself and others around you. When you say something is getting done, the team can trust you. You don’t tolerate mediocrity, but you also dedicate your time to helping others evolve and learn so that the team can operate at a higher level. You also understand that often true differentiation only comes from executing well on very hard things, so you don’t shy away from challenges. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you don’t have a track record of impressive performance.
User focus: You care deeply about understanding the user you are designing for and use a mix of user research techniques to gather that understanding. You are not afraid of talking to users, launching surveys, or looking at behavioural data.
Bias for action: You understand that in spite of the careful approach you take to understanding problems and identifying opportunities, you actively try not to be perfectionist or get yourself tied up in knots. You have a bias for action in order to make progress. You enjoy being scrappy and constraints enthrall you. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you, by default, like building complete and full solutions from the get go.
Salary Range: 160K-200K USD annually
Healthcare benefits: Medical, dental, and vision
Skin in the game: We believe great leaders should share in the success they help create. As a Design Director, you’ll have meaningful equity in the company, giving you real upside as we scale. We want you invested—not just in your work, but in the future we’re building together.
Fully remote position: Work remotely from anywhere you want.
Unlimited PTO: We focus on results. Take the time you need to recharge or enjoy life, work hard when you are back.
Disclaimer
LawnStarter provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or genetics. In addition to federal law requirements, LawnStarter complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.
LawnStarter expressly prohibits any form of workplace harassment based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status. Improper interference with the ability of LawnStarter’s employees to perform their job duties may result in discipline up to and including discharge.
