Product Designer at Santam Insurance

What will you do?

• Home+ is a home ecosystem venture solving three key pain points that every South African home dweller has: repairs & maintenance, electricity & utility management and security. We are doing this while growing the South African economy of SMEs. We are backed by Santam, the market leader in general insurance but we are not an insurance company ourselves. We are a tech company disrupting the home services, utilities and security markets. We expect the team members that we hire to shape the product, company and culture from the ground up.
• We empower our product teams to solve hard problems in ways that our customers love, yet work within the constraints of our business. Our product teams are cross functional and durable, and are generally composed of a Product Manager, Product Designer, a Tech Lead and several engineers. We expect our product teams to have all of the skills necessary to come up with effective solutions that are valuable to our customers, viable for the business given our constraints, feasible given our engineering skills & technology stack and usable by our customers. The Product Manager is accountable for ensuring that a solution is both valuable & viable, while the Tech Lead is accountable for ensuring a solution is feasible and the Product Designer is accountable for ensuring the solution is usable.
• We expect our Product Designers to ensure that our user experience is world class. You will work closely with the Product Manager in discovery work to conduct user research and deeply understand the pain points of our customers. You will help to define unique solutions which are 10x better than the current solutions our potential customers use to solve their problems. Your primary responsibility will be to ensure that our product is intuitive and easy to use. You will update existing user flows to optimize our current product and create new ones as we build out further features. 
• Our Product Designers are responsible for both UX and UI work. We regularly (read: multiple times per week) build wireframes and prototypes to quickly test with customers and iterate until we know that what we are building is easily usable by our customers. After this, you will finalize the UI so that it is ready for developers to use to deliver the product. We expect you to collaborate with other Product Designers to provide each other feedback and build our structural work such as our design system and user interview library.
• As part of this exciting new venture, you will work on challenging, thought-provoking work daily. You will work with a team of like-minded, driven individuals and be exposed to a wide variety of Senior Santam, Sanlam and external stakeholders.

What will make you successful in this role?

• Run customer research to better understand their pain points with current solutions
• Quickly build wireframes and prototypes to test with customers and iterate until we believe it is highly usable by customers
• Explore many potential solutions to given problems while quickly judging the best potential solutions yet not getting fixated on the first idea
• Design and optimise apps to maximise or improve the appeal and usability 
• Build the final UI designs in Figma
• Define interaction models, user task flows, and UI specifications
• Work with the interdisciplinary product team to incorporate a visual or brand identity into the finished product 
• Do whatever needs to get done to support Home+ as we strive to grow

Qualifications and Experience

• University degree in Interaction Design, Interface Design, Human Computer Interaction, Service Design, Design Planning, Strategy, Information Systems, Arts or other relevant degree with 3+ years relevant industry experience OR
• 5+ years relevant industry experience

Knowledge & Experience

• Proven knowledge with a broad range of tools or technologies for example Figma, Sketch, InVision, Principle, Framer or similar prototyping tools
• Deep understanding of both Apple's and Google’s design guidelines 
• Strong experience in translating user research and usability test findings into iterative product solutions
• Ability to work closely with an interdisciplinary team to solve hard problems 
• Continued education and research into UX trends and current design strategy and technologies

Knowledge and Skills

• Ability to ‘think-out-of-the-box’ / lateral thinking with a balance short and long-term thinking
• High drive/self-starter/proactive and anticipate requirements
• Excellent attention to detail
• Strong coordination, prioritisation, organisational and planning skills
• Excellent interpersonal, communication and networking skills across all levels
• Professionalism, excellent judgement, use of discretion and problem-solving abilities

Competencies

• Owner Mindset
• Gets things done
• Empathy
• Collaboration 
• Customer focus 
• Flexibility and adaptability 
• Talent enablement