
Senior Product Designer
Protolabs 🇺🇸 Maple Plain, Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States of America
The Senior Product Designer will lead the design of customer-focused digital experiences across web, mobile, and emerging platforms, translating insights into polished prototypes and cohesive end-to-end journeys. This involves leading research, synthesizing insights, designing complex workflows, and actively contributing to and evolving the design system.
Responsibilities
- Lead generative and evaluative research: user interviews, usability testing, contextual inquiry, concept testing to identify unmet customer needs and validate direction before investment
- Synthesize research into clear insights; frame and shape problems with the Technical Product Manager before solutions are explored, not after
- Build working knowledge of core personas (engineers, procurement buyers, operations managers, suppliers) and use it to ground design decisions in observed behavior, not assumptions
- Design coherent experiences across complex, multi-step workflows: quoting, configuration, ordering, order tracking, supplier interactions
- Produce the right artifacts at the right fidelity: journey maps, service blueprints, flows, wireframes, interactive prototypes, final specs
- Apply accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA) as a baseline expectation, not a post-launch retrofit
- Actively contribute to and evolve the design system
- Use shared patterns, strengthen them through new work, and flag gaps or inconsistencies
- Partner with the Design System team to review component implementation; close the gap between design intent and shipped experience
- Document design decisions and component behavior clearly enough for engineers to implement without ambiguity
- Facilitate design reviews, critique sessions, and design sprints that generate real alignment, not performance of process
- Represent design quality and user needs in cross-functional forums with confidence and evidence
- Mentor mid-level and junior designers through critique, co-working sessions, and honest feedback
- Raise design quality through proactive process improvements, shared design principles, and documentation that outlasts the project
- Stay ahead of how AI-assisted design tools are changing the practice; bring a point of view, not just awareness
Requirements
- Bachelor's Degree (or international equivalent) in Interaction Design, Product Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, or equivalent practical experience
- 5+ years of relevant experience
- Interaction design depth and understanding of how people navigate complex systems
- Research methods, planning and running of moderated tests, interviews, co-design sessions and concept evaluations
- Systems thinking; designing for patterns, not for pages
- Strong written and verbal communication
- Continuous learning mindset, always eager to acquire new knowledge and skills
- Ability to balance competing priorities and allocate resources effectively
- Figma (UX team uses Figma as its main tool, knowledge should be fluent, not learning)
- Prototyping tools: Figma, Cursor, or equivalent for interaction validation
- Familiarity with design handoff and developer collaboration workflows
Benefits
- Competitive total compensation package
- Health Insurance: Traditional OR High Deductible plan
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Health Savings Account (including employer contributions)
- Dental and Vision
- Basic and Supplemental Life Insurance
- Short-Term and Long-Term Disability
- Paid caregiver leave
- PTO + Holiday Pay + Wellness Hours + Volunteer Hours
- 401k with company match and immediate vest
- Employee Stock Purchase Program with a 15% discount
Key Skills
About Protolabs
We are your single digital manufacturing resource from prototyping to production offering injection molding, CNC machining, 3D printing, and sheet metal fabrication services. Visit us at protolabs.com to learn more about how we can help with your next project.
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