The posting
Senior Product Designer
College Board – Technology – Core Assessment Platform, Onboard
Location: This is a remote role. Candidates who live near CB offices have the option of being fully remote or hybrid (Tuesday and Wednesday in office). All CB employees are required to occasionally travel to meet in person for business purposes.
Type: This is a full-time position.
Please include a portfolio of your work in your application that shows examples of your experience leading design research initiatives, we are unable to consider applications without a portfolio link.
About the Team
The Onboard team designs and builds the experiences that welcome new institutions, educators, and learners to College Board’s digital products and guide them to their first moment of value. Onboarding is where trust is earned: the first setup flow, the first sign-in, the first roster imported, the first assessment scheduled. Our mission is to make those first steps clear, confident, and inclusive—so that every user, regardless of their technical fluency, can get set up quickly and start doing meaningful work. We sit at the intersection of identity, provisioning, and activation, partnering across product domains to turn a complex, multi-tenant setup process into an experience that feels simple and human.
About the Opportunity
As a Senior Product Designer on the Onboard team at College Board, you are a highly skilled, thoughtful, and user-centered practitioner with a passion for designing products and experiences that meet real user needs. You will facilitate product discovery, shape design strategy, and guide onboarding and activation solutions from concept through delivery. As the team's first dedicated designer, you will help lay the foundation for experiences that reach every student and educator.
This role depends on close collaboration between product owners/product managers, aligning on priorities and turning roadmap goals into clear design direction so that onboarding and activation experiences deliver on shared outcomes.
You will work across one or more cross-functional teams and products, helping to connect the dots between research, design, engineering, and company mission. You are confident working independently on features—owning the flows that get institutions provisioned and users to first value—while also seeking feedback and alignment with teammates and design leadership. You are an advocate for users and inclusive design. As a creative problem solver, you identify patterns across large systems and balance the big picture with hands-on execution, bringing clarity to complex setup, permissions, and first-run challenges while staying focused on impact.
Your responsibilities will span early-stage discovery, end-to-end product design, usability testing, accessibility, and the creation of design artifacts that support high-quality implementation. You will also contribute to our design culture through mentorship, continuous learning, and collaborative design practices.
In this role, your responsibilities include:
Product Discovery and Design Strategy (30%)
- Design Thinking. Apply design thinking within complex education ecosystems to deeply understand the needs of new users and administrators, reframe onboarding problems, and drive the creation of intuitive, scalable, and human-centered setup and activation experiences.
- Research. Continuously conduct and synthesize generative, formative, and evaluative research on first-run and onboarding journeys, using methods such as user interviews, usability testing, and surveys.
- Design with Users. Facilitate workshops and co-creation sessions with institutions, educators, and internal operations teams to align on onboarding goals and uncover opportunities.
- Data into Insights. Turn activation funnels, drop-off points, and support-ticket and operational metrics into actionable insights that reduce time-to-value.
- Prioritization. Influence prioritization and roadmapping efforts by connecting user needs with business goals and mission, focusing on the highest-friction moments in the onboarding path.
- User Advocacy. Champion human-centered and inclusive design principles for users who may be encountering our products for the very first time.
- Storytelling. Use strategic storytelling to communicate onboarding vision, value, and direction across stakeholders.
Design Execution and Delivery (40%)
- Product Design. Partner with product and engineering teams on continuous discovery to translate concepts into detailed, production-ready, extensible designs — including user flows, sitemaps, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity UI — for setup, provisioning, and activation experiences.
- Design Systems. Apply and contribute to design systems, ensuring visual and functional consistency across onboarding touchpoints and the products users graduate into.
- Plain Language. Write and test onboarding content, instructions, and error messaging using plain language for clarity and accessibility.
- Testing. Conduct usability tests and A/B tests to validate onboarding design decisions and improve completion and activation rates.
- Accessibility. Perform accessibility audits to ensure onboarding meets inclusive design standards, so no user is blocked at the front door.
- Responsive Design. Design for responsive, mobile-first experiences and mobile apps.
- Artificial Intelligence. Experiment with generative AI tools to support ideation, prototyping, and smart onboarding guidance.
- Tools. Use tools like Figma, Miro, and Dovetail to design and document work.
Collaboration and Communication (20%)
- Collaborate. Collaborate with the Design Council, product managers, engineers, researchers, leadership, identity and platform partners, and other stakeholders throughout the design and development process.
- Ceremonies. Participate in standups, sprint planning, design reviews, design critiques, and QA cycles.
- Specifications. Translate design decisions into clear specifications for implementation, including edge cases and error and empty states common to onboarding.
- Presenting. Present ideas, research findings, and designs with confidence and clarity.
- Design Operations. Contribute to company-wide design efforts, including shared tools, systems, and templates.
Growth and Culture (10%)
- Teaching. Mentor junior designers or peers through pairing and feedback.
- Continuous Learning. Continuously invest in personal development and share emerging tools, trends, and provocations.
- Organizational Support. Support design education efforts such as lunch & learns, design critiques, and by contributing to internal documentation.
- Hiring. Participate in hiring and new hire onboarding activities.
About You
You have:
- A portfolio of your work included in your application.
- A Bachelor’s degree in a related field (interaction design, HCI, industrial design, information science, social sciences, computer science, graphic design, etc.) and/or equivalent years of work experience.
- 3–7 years of experience in product or service design
- A product design mindset and experience designing for complex, content-rich websites and applications, including strong skills in creating and communicating design artifacts, such as user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity UI designs.
- Proficiency in design thinking and human-centered methodologies, with the ability to reframe challenges and translate insights into actionable design direction.
- Experience designing onboarding, first-run, setup, or account/identity experiences—or a demonstrated ability to bring clarity to complex, multi-step flows—is a strong plus.
- Strong skills in information design, user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity UI design, with fluency in tools like Figma, Miro, and Dovetail.
- Experience applying generative and evaluative research methods, along with facilitation skills to lead workshops and co-creation sessions.
- A strong understanding of design systems, responsive design, and accessibility standards, including designing for web and native mobile platforms.
- Comfortable discussing technical constraints and collaborating with engineers to ensure design feasibility (experience with front-end technologies is a plus).
- A commitment to inclusive, ethical, and user-centered design, with the ability to write and test content using plain language principles.
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with a user advocacy mindset and the ability to work effectively across cross-functional teams.
- Experience influencing without formal authority, including using data and evidence to build alignment and helping partners work through disagreement
- Curiosity and adaptability—you’re self-motivated, continuously learning, and excited by emerging tools and trends, including generative AI.
- The ability to travel at a minimum of 3-5 times a year to College Board offices or on behalf of College Board business (including but not limited to traveling to client/user sites to engage with stakeholders).
- Authorization to work in the United States.
All roles at College Board require:
- A passion for expanding educational and career opportunities and mission-driven work
- Curiosity and enthusiasm for emerging technologies, with a willingness to experiment with and adopt new AI-driven solutions and comfort with learning and applying new digital tools independently and proactively.
- Clear and concise communication skills, written and verbal
- A learner's mindset and a commitment to growth: welcoming diverse perspectives, giving and receiving timely, respectful feedback, and continuously improving through iterative learning and user input.
- A drive for impact and excellence: solving complex problems, making data-informed decisions, prioritizing what matters most, and continuously improving through learning, user input, and external benchmarking.
- A collaborative and empathetic approach: working across differences, fostering trust, and contributing to a culture of shared success
- Authorization to work in the United States
About Our Process
- Application review will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled.
- While the hiring process may vary, it generally includes: resume and application submission, recruiter phone/video screen, hiring manager interview, a performance exercise such as a design portfolio review or design challenge, a panel interview, a conversation with leadership and reference checks.
About Our Benefits and Compensation
College Board offers a competitive benefits and compensation program that attracts top talent looking to make a difference in education. As a self-sustaining non-profit, we believe in compensating employees equitably in relation to each other, their qualifications, their impact, and the relevant market.
The hiring range for a new employee in this position is $98,000 to $134,000. College Board differentiates salaries by location so where you live will narrow the portion of this range in which you can expect a salary.
Your salary will be carefully determined based on your location, relevant experience, the external labor market, and the pay of College Board employees in similar roles. College Board strives to provide our best offer up front based on this criteria.
Your salary is only one part of all that College Board offers, including but not limited to:
- A comprehensive package designed to support the well-being of employees and their families and promote education. Our robust benefits package includes health, dental, and vision insurance, generous paid time off, paid parental leave, fertility benefits, pet insurance, tuition assistance, retirement benefits, and more.
- Recognition of exceptional performance through annual bonuses, salary growth over time through market increases, and opportunities for merit raises and promotions based on increased scope of responsibility.
- A job that matters, a team that cares, and a place to learn, innovate and thrive.
You can expect to have transparent conversations about benefits and compensation with our recruiters throughout your application process.
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