Product Design Director, Lending and Production

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Better is redefining homeownership and making it simpler, faster—and most importantly—more accessible for everyone. We leverage creative technology and innovation to make the homebuying journey more approachable and understandable. Here are some interesting facts to help you get to know Better:

  • Right now we’re funding over $3 billion in home loans per month
  • We’ve funded over $14 billion in loans and $3.5 billion in insurance
  • We ranked #1 in the U.S. on LinkedIn's Top Startups 2020
  • We ranked #11 on Fortune’s Best Places to Work in Financial Services 2020
  • Our Founder and CEO was named in Comparably's Top 25 CEOs for Diversity
  • We were listed to Forbes’ FinTech 50 2020
  • And #15 on the 2020 CNBC Disruptor 50 
  • We’ve secured over $254 million from our investors to date 

Our company is made up of driven, passionate people who bring their unique backgrounds and perspectives to everything we do. We are committed to fostering diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusion.  We encourage individual potential rather than years of experience. We see the value in each person’s perspective, and recognize their talents, regardless of what the market says. We believe it’s important to nurture a company culture that encourages curiosity and passion—from employee resource groups and learning opportunities to team outings and community outreach. 

The Department

Design plays a massive role in achieving this. Mortgages are complicated and quite frankly, stale. As designers, our job is to take all this complexity, distill it down to its essence, and repackage it into something simple, intuitive, and enjoyable.

That’s why we don’t distinguish between UX, Visual, or Product Designers. Our designers are all of them — part business strategist, part user researcher, and 100% committed to creating an exceptional user experience in a space that sorely needs it.

The Product Team

The Lending & Production team is responsible for automating the mortgage process and ensuring we build best-in-class tools that let our teams accomplish more while enabling them to provide a frictionless experience for borrowers. The tools, integrations, and features the Lending & Production team builds help our sales, processing, underwriting, closing, and support teams work more efficiently and productively. Everything we build should be widely adopted, user-friendly, delightful, reliable, performant, and of high quality. It is critical to be data-informed and we always need to connect the work we are doing with our higher-level metrics and KPIs.

The Role

As a Design Director here at Better, you will be in charge of growing and leading a product design team. You will be responsible for guiding your team through difficult situations and ensuring their output is top-notch. You will influence your surface area's design practice, influence the product strategy for our internal tools and admin team, and influence the product execution and quality.

As a Design Director, you will provide design mentorship and be a champion for both craft and career development. You will oversee and build a team of very strong IC designers and managers. You will create an environment for growth and efficiency by providing organization cover for your team to help the designers execute their best work.

As a Design Director, you see no boundaries between form and function, and you view a product by the way it works vs. the way it looks. You have an impeccable eye for design and detail, and you are comfortable in an ambiguous and fast-paced environment. Design Directors here need to see and plan ten steps ahead. You are essentially a strategist who brings work to life through design. You let the work do all the talking, and you can still be hands-on and work directly with your design team.

You have experience leading large teams and have a track record of delivering business impact and delivering exceptional, visual polish, experiences, and complex interactions. You are a proven leader and excellent communicator and never shy away from a challenge. You are comfortable working closely with product managers, engineers, marketers, and executives.

What You Bring

  • 12+ years experience as a Designer and 5+ years experience growing and leading design teams (+managing managers)
  • Proven background in building a high performing team of designers
  • Can work independently without much oversight
  • Ability to think big and understand how to drive action and results
  • A strong process for building product experiences
  • Ability to give clear and actionable feedback to unblock your teams and move the work forward
  • Comfortable stepping into uncomfortable situations to provide clarity for your team
  • Knows how to have tough conversations with your design team when things are not going right
  • You are data-informed and have a growth mindset
  • Ability to manage a budget including allocated resources and planning for future hiring needs
  • Experience recruiting, hiring, and retaining multi-disciplinary design teams
  • Impeccable attention to detail
  • Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic startup environment
  • No excuse winning mindset
  • Proven ability to solve complex UX problems and product strategy skills to deliver the best visual design solution
  • Clear, concise, confident, and proven ability to synthesis and preset your work
  • You have experience leading both cross-functional design teams with various crafts (Visual, Interaction/IA, Writing, Research). This includes skills like management of senior managers and across multiple levels of Product/UX Designer experience.
  • You have a user and evidence-based problem-solving mentality. You are always looking to hone your team's instincts through user feedback and data insight. You understand the role and importance of qualitative and quantitative methodologies.
  • You are hungry to learn and evolve in all things. From leadership skills to design craft to process to industry and market trends — you never stop pushing into the next big challenge.
  • You are familiar and comfortable motivating large design systems that you may or may not own directly—balancing the needs of our user experience principles and business goals with the practicalities of a company that values speed-to-ship over all things.

What You'll Do

  • Establish and grow a strong design culture, provide leadership, and ensure your team success
  • Manage a team of designers and design managers, provide design
  • and push the quality of the work
  • Influence product strategy and lead your team in executing design work with a high level of polish
  • You have experience solving a range of tactical and contained problems like loosely defined product ideas and challenges and difference of opinions across your team and partners
  • Hire and retain top talent, focusing on attracting designers from various backgrounds and perspectives
  • Remove biases from the process by bringing business inputs and user needs to the forefront to define a great product
  • Be responsible for the design and product insights of all internal tooling experiences
  • Work with small multi-disciplinary teams made up of representatives from engineering, product, and excellent Customer Support teams
  • Consider existing insights, technical constraints, business needs, and specific platform demand to produce data-solutions and data-informed design solutions
  • You'll have full ownership of your team's work and total responsibility for every detail, every step of the way
  • Define challenging objectives and key results with the team, monitor progress, eliminate roadblocks, and prevent distractions



The Better mission is rooted in values that drive us.

  • We do what’s in the best interest of the consumer, not ourselves
  • We have growth mindsets, not fixed ones
  • We believe that success lies in execution, not credentials
  • We act like owners, not just employees
  • We work to find answers on our own, not wait for them to be given to us 
  • We optimize for mission, not ego

Our mission speaks for itself—we continue to outpace the industry at every turn. We’ve joined forces in partnership with Ally Bank, and our backers have helped build some of the most transformative tech and finance companies in history. Kleiner Perkins, Goldman Sachs, American Express, Citigroup, Activant Capital, Ally Bank, and others have invested in our vision for what homeownership can be.

Better Benefits & Compensation

Our total rewards package consists of base salary, equity, benefits, and opportunity for yearly cash bonus. Some of our benefits include:

  • Comprehensive healthcare, retirement, and voluntary benefits. Think medical, dental, vision, savings accounts, 401k, and more.
  • Personalized care and tools for realizing your mental health and wellness goals
  • Robust wellbeing offerings that allow you  unlimited access to virtual fitness, meditation, yoga, cooking classes, homeschooling preparedness, physical therapy, and more.
  • Unlimited time off (with manager approval)
  • 12 weeks of paid parental leave after 90 days of employment, and 20 weeks after 24 months of service.
  • Inclusive fertility benefits for you or your eligible dependents, regardless of participation in a Better medical plan.

Better is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion or religious creed, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, marital status, family or parental status, disability, military or veteran status, or any other basis protected by law. If you require further accommodations or have questions regarding accessibility of our roles, please reach out to [email protected]. All employment decisions at Better are based on a person’s merit, business needs, and role requirements.

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Location

2201 Broadway, Floor 2, Oakland, CA 94612

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