Performance Profile

The Performance Profile is a helpful tool for promoting alignment within the hiring team. It clearly outlines the expectations, responsibilities, and necessary qualifications for a particular role. This ensures that all members of the hiring team have a consistent understanding of what they are looking for in a candidate, which streamlines the hiring process and reduces misunderstandings or discrepancies in candidate evaluation. Additionally, the Performance Profile provides transparency for candidates by offering comprehensive insights into the role’s requirements and desired outcomes. This helps candidates make informed decisions about their suitability for the position. This transparency not only enhances the candidate experience but also facilitates smoother communication and alignment between candidates and the hiring team throughout the selection process.

Here’s a Performance Profile I created for a Sr. UX Designer position while I was at Knock.

Role: Sr. Director, User Experience
Timeframe: 2021

Pre-Work

Sr. UX Designer
The Sr. UX Designer will develop and lead best-in-class user experience for Knock, with a particular focus on the Agent Experience.



The Sr. UX Designer will accomplish the following within their first year:

Proactive UX Leadership

  • Provide guidance to designers, engineers, and product managers on UX best practices, patterns, and usability testing to support user experience.

  • Define the design process within an agile slingshot, including design workshops and design reviews.

  • Collaborate with the team to prioritize impactful data-informed products.

  • Create impactful agent experiences (strategy, functionality and visual design).

  • Collaborate with UX Research partner to surface user needs and drive product initiatives.

  • Increase agent engagement and satisfaction.


Thought Leadership

  • Share UX expertise and learnings with the team, such as mobile design best practices, emerging trends, tech and product innovation.

  • Collaborate with UX team to push work to be the best in class by providing:

    • helpful design feedback for other designers

    • bring new ways of doing things to the team

    • be open to trying new ways of working


UX Advocacy 

  • Be a fearless advocate for the user and their experiences, while balancing business needs.

Tactical UX/UI

  • Help to evolve and contribute to our Design System.

  • Keep the UX team up-to-date on what you're working on for cross-team visibility.

  • ElevateUX/UI in agent mobile (native apps, iOS, Android) and web experiences to be intuitive, approachable, and helpful.

Work Culture

What will the work environment be like for the Sr. UX Designer?

Our company operates in an agile environment and follows scrum practices. We are highly collaborative and encourage our team members to work together, while also ensuring that everyone has enough focus time to work on their own tasks. We are a fully remote company, but we do have occasional offsite events throughout the year (usually 1-4 events per year). We have regular weekly meetings with different teams, including the Slingshot, UX team, product team, and the company as a whole.

At times, we may need to pivot and change our current work. We encourage constructive feedback and open communication between team members. We have a supportive and kind team of Knockstars, and we work quickly while balancing quality, speed, and prioritization of impactful work.

We are a research-driven company that is fully invested in UX research and design. You will work on a cross-functional team, known as a Slingshot team, that focuses on one user type, Agents. Our leadership team is committed to empowering and giving autonomy to Slingshot teams, allowing them to drive strategy and outcomes. As such, this role will play a significant part in UX planning and execution.


The Position Summary

The Sr. UX Designer will be responsible for improving and advancing our agent mobile app and web experiences. They will utilize their UX/UI expertise to create proactive UX experiences based on qualitative and quantitative data, as well as company and team objectives. This role will take a holistic approach to account for the entire agent experience, including people and processes.

As a mentor, the Sr. UX Designer will bring enthusiasm and passion for UX experimentation, testing, and product innovation. They will establish a UX design framework and strategy for their team, and share new ideas, tools, and methods to enhance our user experience, resulting in impactful user and business outcomes.

Throughout the product development process, the Sr. UX Designer will be the UX leader, from problem definition to detailed UX and visual design to usability testing and QA. They will participate in discovery sessions to understand the context of their work and use that knowledge as their foundation. They will design workshops, create workshop artifacts, user flows, wireframes, mid-to-high fidelity static mockups, and prototypes.


The Position Objectives

In the first year of hiring the Sr. UX Designer will accomplish:

Objectives:

  • Establish a UX process for the AX Slingshot

    • Audit and understand the current UX process.

    • Identify UX gaps and pain points within the team.

    • Propose UX process changes and get approval from the team.

    • Work with the team to implement the proposed UX process changes.

  • Improve agent experience from being a manual experience to a proactive one.

  • Increase agent engagement, retention, and satisfaction.

  • Help the AX slingshot define critical objectives for roadmap planning based on research insights.

  • Enhance UX and UI on all agent experiences to make them intuitive, helpful, and approachable.


The Organizational Structure

This position will report to the Sr. Director, User Experience, Allie McKinley, who leads the UX team.

The slingshot you’ll be working on is the Agent Experience slingshot (AX). The AX team is a cross functional group that works on all people, process and product for real estate agents. The team is composed of Product Managers, Engineer Managers, Full Stack Engineers, Product Designer, UX Researcher, Marketing, and Business Ops. You will also work closely and collaborate with the UX team, currently 4 designers/1 researcher with open design and research roles posted.


Situational Needs and Challenges

What does the work environment demand of the person who will fill this position?

  • Remote work requires proactive communication and initiative to be successful. You may not always have spontaneous opportunities to share your ideas and thoughts.

  • Due to the regulatory and complex nature of our products and services, teams can seem siloed. You will need to be proactive in learning all aspects of the business.

  • Knock is not a top-down organization. Slingshot teams are empowered and expected to identify and solve problems within their domain for the 3 P's (people, process, product). Problems are discussed and shared with leadership, but it is left to the team to creatively solve and implement solutions.

  • We are a collaborative and transparent organization, so you will need to work closely with your slingshot and include them early in your process. You will have to find a balance between the quality of work and the speed of delivery.

  • You will need to be excellent at identifying and prioritizing impactful work. Change happens, so being adaptable and flexible are important qualities to be successful here.

  • You will have to be a self-starter and, at times, figure things out on your own. Proactive UX thinking (aka strategic UX thinking) is an essential function of this position.


What will make this job challenging?**

*In interviews, we’ll want to explore how candidates have dealt with similar challenges.

  • The AX slingshot has a strategic skill gap, the Senior UX Designer will help the guide the team towards impactful work.

  • Our work environment is fast-paced, so the ability to identify and prioritize impactful tasks is crucial.

  • Meeting with internal stakeholders can be challenging due to their busy schedules. Therefore, the Senior UX Designer will need to be flexible and creative in your research process.

  • Knock is a mature startup, but change is still common. This can include team or org structure changes, shifts in product direction, changes in priorities and objectives, and hiring. While we aim to be proactive, there will be times when we need to react quickly. Therefore, being adaptable and flexible is crucial.

  • The AX slingshot requires a stronger design process, which will need to be developed and implemented by the Senior UX Designer.

  • This role requires hitting the ground running and quickly understanding agent behavior, needs, and pain points, as well as identifying and filling UX gaps within the team.

  • Technical debt can hinder UX, and although we are working on addressing it, it still exists.


Basic Requirements

  • Able to work remotely

  • US citizen

  • Lives in the US

  • Must be willing to travel to offsite events and in person research session