The posting
Overview
Established in 2000, Conservice is the nation’s foremost utility management company, serving housing communities, commercial buildings, and other property management firms. Our Utility Experts manage our services to help our clients conserve natural resources and save money.
This is the senior-most design role in the Client Experience portfolio, and the company’s first and only full-time designer in Product Development — effectively founding the design discipline internally. As an individual contributor, you will own the design of all client-facing products that clients use to manage their utility expenses, run aspects of property operations, manage resident billing, handle certain accounting tasks, and access their own data, together with the reporting and data products underneath it. You also own the systems the rest of the design work runs on: the current design system, the information architecture, and the standards our contract design team builds within. The portfolio extends to the platform services and internal applications the client experience is built on, so your structural decisions carry past the screens clients see and into the tooling our own Utility Experts use on clients’ behalf.
You will report into the Product organization, with direct visibility to the VP of Product and CTO on design decisions. There is currently no design manager or design principal above this role — as the design practice matures, this role is positioned to shape, and potentially lead, its growth.
What You Would Own
Problem framing and influence
- Which problems are worth designing, determined alongside product and engineering leadership while the roadmap is still being formed
- Input on how the design practice grows, including hiring and the shape of the roles that come after this one
- Clear, credible communication of design rationale and trade-offs to product, engineering, and executive stakeholders
Research, evidence, validation
- Continuous discovery with enterprise clients, and the conversion of what we hear into structural decisions
- The measures we agree on before we ship, and the post-launch evaluation that establishes whether the design worked
- Usability and concept testing as a standing habit rather than a phase at the end
Information architecture
- The IA of client-facing products: navigation, taxonomy, naming, and the mental model clients carry between them
Standards, systems, and the quality of work
- Maintenance and contributions to the design system, component library, semantic library, and adoption across teams
- Oversight of our contract design team’s output and adherence to system and design standards, for as long as we continue to engage contractors
- Design ops, documentation, library hygiene, handoff standards, and review processes
- The design quality bar across the department, including running design reviews and elevating design craft
- The AI design skill library (Figma, Claude) that puts our patterns, components, UX principles, and accessibility rules in a form AI tooling can consume
Service design
- Service blueprints across client-facing and backstage touchpoints, including the human service, communications, and training that sit alongside the product
- Identifying the cases where the correct fix is a service change rather than a screen
Product design and delivery
- Flows, wireframes, prototypes, and specifications
- AI-mediated experiences, including an AI data analyst, agentic workflows, and the human review and correction paths those require
- Accessibility standards appropriate for the product and users, held to WCAG 2.1 AA
What We Are Looking For
- Eight or more years in product design, at least three of them designing products used and paid for by external business customers (B2B and/or B2B2C). Internal tools and consumer work are valuable but not sufficient on their own.
- Influence without full ownership. You have changed the direction of teams you were not embedded in, and you can tell us about a standard, a system, or a structural decision that others adopted.
- Information architecture work at scale. You have restructured a large, complex information space.
- Service design fluency. Blueprints, journey work across digital and human touchpoints, and at least one case where you changed the service rather than the interface alone.
- Research and testing you run yourself. Planning, moderating, synthesis, and the discipline to get less wrong faster rather than more certain later.
- Behavioral data in your practice. You can specify the instrumentation you used or need, explain what you learned, and describe changes you made because of it.
- AI in the work, and in your practice. Experience designing for cases where a model does part of the user’s job (or aptitude for thinking this way), and evidence of using AI tooling to move faster in synthesis, prototyping, and production.
- Problem framing you can show. Complex domains and ambiguous problems, decomposed out loud, including at least one case where you influenced what a team was going to build rather than how it looked.
- Working fluency in Figma, and comfort in a token-driven environment with shared components and design system governance.
- Comfort operating as the sole in-house designer, setting direction and managing contractor output without a design manager above you.
Valuable, not required: experience as the most senior designer on a team with no design manager; utilities, real estate, fintech, insurance, or another data-heavy regulated domain; research and testing platforms such as Maze, Qualtrics, or Optimal Workshop; product analytics and observability tooling (e.g., Heap, Amplitude, Datadog, Power BI); exposure to microfrontend architectures; a background in HCI, human factors, psychology, research, or service design, whether by degree or experience. A relevant degree (BA or higher) is typical and preferred, but a portfolio that demonstrates the requirements above counts for more.
Additional Details
- Location: Remote
- Employment type: Full-time
- Compensation: Competitive
