Partner, Product and UX Lead

Start Date: Immediate Role Type: Full-time Location: Flexible; fully remote/virtual team Travel: Willingness to travel approximately once a month for ~2-3 days (~5-15% travel); with some periods of increased travel Who We Are Transcend is a national nonprofit that helps communities reimagine and redesign schools so every young person can thrive in a rapidly changing world. Across the country, communities are recognizing that classrooms built for the industrial age aren’t preparing learners for what’s next. Instead, schools must be designed for continuous evolution: relevant, resilient, and ready for the future. For more than a decade, Transcend has partnered with school and system leaders to build the capacity for bold, lasting change—change led by the people who live it every day. We’ve worked with nearly 500 schools and 200 districts serving over 225,000 students in 35 states. Together, we’ve seen what’s possible when communities lead redesign with proven methods, insight, and support. From that work, we develop and share tools, research, and models that help schools everywhere make the leap to extraordinary learning—for every child, in every community. For more information, visit our website or follow us on LinkedIn . Transcend’s Program Team Transcend’s Program Team compiles and stewards the approaches, tools, and resources that power our partnerships with school communities. This includes: Approaches, tools, and resources that support the content of innovative school design, from primers on cultivating agency in early learning to the implementation supports that enable an evidence-based model to be adopted or adapted into a school Approaches, tools, and resources that support the process of innovative school design, from guidance and templates for annual planning to tools for launching a design team to curated examples of strong outputs at each step of the journey Technology-enabled tools that enable more effective and accessible engagement with content and process supports for innovative school design Experimenting with AI-enabled tools that make our tools, resources, and processes more effective, accessible, and improve the user experience. We believe products and technology have the potential to significantly amplify the impact of our work by increasing access to our resources and empowering our partners with innovative tools. The Opportunity We’re hiring a Partner, Product and UX Lead to be the inaugural full-time experience design & product lead on our Program Team. This is a hybrid hands-on leadership role for someone who thrives at identifying, solving for and managing unaddressed user needs and loves tackling them end to end at the intersection of product design and strategy, experience design/user experience (UX), user interface (UI), and design thinking. The role will ‘take the baton’ of experience design & product leadership for individual products or tools from senior consultants that have been supporting our early efforts in product development over the past year, ramping into full product and design leadership for those designated tech-enabled solutions as part of the product suite that Transcend is developing to drive our impact and scale in the coming years. In this role, you will help formulate and lead product design and strategy for key products and help drive the identification of solutions for a growing suite of largely technology-enabled tools. You will work closely with program team leadership, engineering contractors, cross-functional partners, key stakeholders and users to take products from early concepts and prototypes through discovery, iteration, and launch. In doing so, you’ll balance big-picture systems thinking, design, and meticulous attention to interaction detail—making sure our tools feel intuitive, clear, coherent, and delightful for educators and community members doing complex design work. In this role, you’ll get to: Identify and help lead product strategy and design for core tools (in partnership with the Chief Program Officer and Tech & Information lead) Help build a practice of experience design/UX at Transcend (including eventually leading a multidisciplinary team–initially this role will partner with UX/UI contractors) Drive discovery and iteration through research and synthesis Translate real-world school design processes into digital experiences Collaborate directly with both users and the product development team Product manage key products and tools Experiment with emerging tools The examples below are meant to illustrate the types of challenges and creative opportunities you may encounter in this role. They are not comprehensive, and the exact mix of work will vary over time based on priorities and partnerships: Interactive school performance insights: Lead the design of an interactive interface to elicit and display ratings on a school's current performance, conditions, and design of the student experience. The experience helps users understand the key factors leading to a school’s performance, and can probe for more information and actionable next steps on how to improve things. This could build on data and visualizations similar to GreatSchools , combined with dashboard-style tools like those created in Tableau . Collaborative school design experiences: Identify the opportunity for and create engaging tools and accompanying interfaces that enable school design teams to prioritize the learner outcomes they value most (for example, through a “dotmocracy” process tool like PollUnit ). These tools support shared sense-making and help teams develop a revised Portrait of a Graduate, which can then be shared with and refined through broader community feedback. An example of developing online and real life versions of thought exercises and facilitation tools could be similar to those found in the SessionLab library . Virtual school inspiration visits: Create the strategy and lead the design effort for “virtual inspiration visits” that school design teams can take to learn about the most engaging and effective learning experiences in the country and identify which ideas they want to incorporate into their own school's design vision. This could be similar to the experiential, confidence-building approach used by Legends . Who You Are You design and manage products and experiences that are both intuitive and delightful—turning complex insights into simple, elegant solutions that just work. You’re comfortable operating in ambiguity, jumping in when things are still fuzzy—taking loosely defined needs and helping turn early ideas into something concrete, thoughtful, and ready to test. You’re eager to put your solutioning and design talents to work on something that matters—helping schools evolve for the realities of today’s world, where AI and innovation are reshaping how students learn and thrive. You’re excited by the chance to be the inaugural solution designer on a small, scrappy, mission-driven team—taking a promising early-stage product and helping to manage it through multiple rounds of community-centered discovery, design, and delivery. You bring strong skills and solid experience in business analysis and UX/UI design, and you’re constantly expanding your toolkit—exploring how the latest technologies, including AI, can help you bring ideas to life faster and better. Now, you’re ready to combine your product design superpowers with Transcend’s decade of experience in school design—helping scale what works, reach more communities, and create learning experiences that truly prepare young people for the future. To all of this, you also bring the following knowledge, skills, experiences, and orientations: Experiences: You have experience working in the K-12 context–whether as a teacher, a school leader or by leading the creation or implementation of products built to enable instruction You’ve led/and or supported end-to-end product design and product management, from early research and discovery through concepting, prototyping, iteration, and launch—often in complex or ambiguous problem spaces You translate real-world services, processes, and workflows into intuitive, elegant digital tools and platforms that make people’s lives easier You define the strategic approach to a problem while crafting every interaction and detail with care—balancing big-picture thinking with thoughtful execution You collaborate closely with engineers and product leaders in iterative cycles, continuously improving products through shared learning and feedback You thrive in cross-functional settings, bringing structure to uncertainty and momentum to ideas that are still taking shape You’ve incorporated AI into your workflows in a way that supports strong execution Skills: You design with users at the center—thinking holistically about flow, navigation, and information architecture to create intuitive and meaningful experiences You can take an ambiguous, high level concept or approach and flesh it out in ways that bring it to life; transforming it into clear, concrete, and tangible solutions You bring strong visual design craft and information architecture skills —using layout, intuitive labeling, typography, hierarchy, workflow and accessibility principles to create polished, engaging interfaces You blend UX, product strategy, and product management, breaking down complex problems, mapping logic, and defining requirements that prioritize user value and impact in ways that drive product-market fit You conduct user research and field discovery, identifying patterns and translating insights into clear, actionable design direction You translate customer workflows into user journeys, wireframes, and interaction models You develop wireframes and present them to stakeholders for walkthroughs and validation You can work closely with Product & Engineering teams to identify, capture, and document requirements directly from customers and stakeholders Incorporate user feedback rapidly into refined UX designs aligned with our strategy and roadmap You’re fluent with modern design and collaboration tools like Figma, Miro, and prototyping software to model, test, and communicate your work You’re a strong writer and storyteller, able to explain design rationale clearly and bring others along through compelling visuals and narratives You manage multiple workstreams and timelines with ease, bringing order, focus, and follow-through to dynamic, fast-moving environments Orientations: A commitment to Transcend’s mission of transforming education, with a passion for creating innovative school models that generate unprecedented results for all students Eagerness to embrace and live into Transcend’s core values in how you show up and work You lead with a service-oriented mindset, designing with communities rather than for them and holding user voices at the core You’re curious and proactive, rolling up your sleeves to figure things out, navigate ambiguity, and move ideas into action You are persistent in your pursuit of solutions, don’t easily give up and keep at it until you find a way to address the need at hand You value iteration over perfection, testing, learning, and refining to reach clarity and impact on the other side of complexity You’re comfortable zooming between big-picture systems thinking and detailed execution, knowing when to step back and when to dive deep You’re energized by collaboration, working across disciplines and with diverse partners to build shared success You bring calm and clarity amid uncertainty, staying grounded and focused even when the path forward isn’t fully mapped You’re energized by the potential of AI-enabled work—curious, open, and excited to experiment with new tools and techniques as the space evolves Application & Hiring Process We review applications on a rolling basis and are committed to a thoughtful and people-centered hiring experience that helps candidates feel what it’s like to work at Transcend. Here’s what you can expect if you are selected to move forward: Initial interview with the team via Zoom to learn more about your interest and experiences. A note on compensation: during your initial interview with the team, we will confirm your location and accompanying salary range. *More on how we determine this is below Try-on activity to engage in a role-aligned exercise. This helps us get a sense of how you approach the work and gives you a feel for what the role might be like Interview with the hiring manager and other members of the team, where we’d debrief the try-on task and engage in some scenarios you are likely to encounter in the role Interview with the team, where you will meet with a small group of Transcend teammates with whom you would most likely collaborate in the role Final interview with our Chief Program Officer Reference checks to learn more about your superpowers and working style Salary As a national team, we apply a cost-of-labor adjustment by adjusting salaries into 3 geographical bands (geo-band) in order to offer competitive compensation for all employees across the US. These geo-bands help us tailor compensation appropriately based on the specific location of each teammate. Below are the three salary geo-bands for this role, and we will confirm the individual range for your location during this initial interview, if you move forward in the process. Geo Comp 1: Currently Includes: NYC metro area, CA Bay Area, Boston City, LA City, Washington, D.C, Seattle $140,000-$195,000 Geo Comp 2: Currently includes locations such as: San Diego; New Haven, CT; Ventura, CA $133,000-$185,250 Geo Comp 3: Currently Includes: Most other US locations $126,000-$175,500 A Few Nuts & Bolts We are an experienced team focused on extraordinary learning for all. We welcome candidates who are passionate about ensuring that all students thrive. We are also committed to providing our colleagues with a competitive benefits package and offer medical, dental, and vision coverage options, org-wide holidays, paid time off, paid parental leave, professional development opportunities, and fully remote work. We take pride in our collaborative environment, exceptional team, and shared commitment to principled, impactful work. We look forward to learning more about you!