Design Lead at Coliga

Product / Print / UX / UI

As a team member with Coliga, you’ll equip people with the tools to organize around opportunities and add value to their communities.

We’re all about products that are all about people.

A product designer to create holistic, human-centered experiences across Coliga’s web, mobile products and print communication. You will collaborate with a small, multidisciplinary team to empower creative people around the world to buy and sell the services they trust.

If that sounds like something you’d be good at, read on.

As a Product Designer at Coliga, you’ll be an ambassador for our users, representing them all the way from that “aha!” idea moment through implementation. Simply put, you’ll be designing experiences that always put people and simplicity first. Day to day, you’ll hang with partners from all sorts of disciplines and perspectives. So, we’ll trust you to be the champions of UX, and to maintain a clear understanding of goals throughout the lifecycle of a project.

You’ll contribute to strategic product thinking. You’ll partner with our team to research with our users and data to understand user needs and market opportunities. You might create detailed interaction flows one day, develop content for our media channels the next, and write simple, digestible emails the next. Whether on business, customer service, operations, or marketing teams, you’ll support your partners beyond our product team with excellent design and communication. Last but not least, you’ll build lively, front-end prototypes that engineers will use to guide the design of a “final” product.

We, your peers (and likely future friends), will help you craft cohesive UIs that support the product and our brand. We’ll help you learn and grow, and open doors to unique opportunities in Berlin and around the world. You will teach us some new tricks and process. If you’re a jack-of-all-trades and a master of one, you’ll thrive at Coliga. Also, if you like to have fun. We like fun here.

Some other things you’ll do:

• Think clearly about rollling out new concepts in steps.
• Make people-centered design decisions informed by data and user research
• Think strategically about rolling out designs in small steps to validate your assumptions
• Turn challenging workflows into simple, usable and elegant experiences
• Wear many hats, from high-level product thinking, to interaction flows and just-enough mockups — all the way to prototypes and front-end implementation (any other hat is fine too, we’re open to all styles)
• Share work with fellow team members and advisors, giving and receiving feedback
• Collaborate with the team at Coliga: Around Product, Engineering, Research, Data, Support, Business, Operations Design and Marketing. Only together can we develop and ship holistic, brand-aligned experiences.
• Help shape your team’s roadmap through clear communication and feedback
• Work with people who are passionate about design, but who also make music, dance, build bikes, meditate, host events, write blogs, cook, party and enjoy the special vibe of the city of Berlin. It’s not all computers over here.
• Live in, or be willing to commute to our beautiful office in the sunny Agora Collective in Neukölln

About us:

We strive to make operations and interactions between our service buyers and entrepreneurial sellers as intuitive and simple as possible. Through product and user research, our team strives to ideate, validate, and build the framework for a new economy; one where talented and passionate people can connect with each other and self-organise in groups to live and work towards a more equitable and sustainable future.

You:

• Have 3+ years of cross-platform product design experience
• Believe that product,design and organizational decisions are inextricably linked
• Are able to provide samples of work that show creative, user-centered UX solutions, strong visual design and solid information architecture
• Demonstrate working knowledge of modern development technologies like HTML and SASS/CSS
• Are skilled in Adobe CS and have experience with Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator
• Delight in drawing up quick sketches, animated prototypes and experiments to validate ideas and opinions
• Value quality with an eye for detail in what you make and how you make it
• Give and receive honest, thoughtful feedback
• Are unafraid to change your opinion in the face of new information or understanding of the product goals — you have strong beliefs, but you’re open-minded
• Communicate design decisions openly and confidently, regardless of the audience — engineers, PMs, executives, other designers, etc.
• Are willing to work outside your comfort zone — maybe even excited about it!
• Want to seek out and develop a design process that encourages collaboration between others in the team
• Advocate for the importance of research-informed design, and has partnered with research teams — or better yet, led research experiments — to validate and inform product thinking
• Are super excited about learning and growing to take your professional skills to the next level

Bonus points if you:

• Have experience designing for global marketing campaigns that consider targeted experiences depending on previous user interactions and their locale
• Have experience working on projects that span both print and screen, and are comfortable talking about the unique opportunities and limitations of both
• Have experience creating or maintaining content management systems, and can talk about weighing product decisions for both the user creating the content and the end user consuming the content

What’s next

If you’re interested in joining our team, please send a cover letter along with your resume telling us why you’d be right for the position. As you’ve probably guessed, Coliga is a place that values individuality and variety. We don’t want you to be like everyone else, we don’t even want you to be like us — we want you to be like you! So write to us, in your own human voice, and tell us what you’re all about.

Feel free to point us to any online presence you may have (weblog, Twitter, Facebook, rap sheet), and if you write, draw or practice a craft, that means something to us, and we would love to hear about it when you write!

Oh, and just so you know

Coliga is driven by purpose. In everything we do, we strive to embody our values:

Equity — Coliga is about equitable value distribution. We believe that everyone that contributes to the acquisition and completion of a job should be rewarded for their contribution.By enabling communities and networks to act as marketplaces, we distribute the information and value that would normally go to a central platform such as freelancer.com or Upwork towards local hubs, while we take a small transaction fee for the technology.

Values we run our company using Holacracy, a governance operating system built on principles of self-organization. This makes sure that everyone has a chance to raise their voice, propose new ideas and take the lead in areas that matter to them. We also envision integrating our community of users into our decision making processes through opportunities for co-creation.

Ownership — We’re legally structuring our company so that we are bound to our values. In searching for financing, many companies become an object of speculation and lose control over time. In order to avoid that. We are exploring a form of ownership called “self-ownership” or purpose ownership. Companies like Bosch and Zeiss have successfully structured alternative of ownership models in Germany. We developed a hack on the ownership structure of our company redefining ownership to guarantee that the purpose always stays in front of the profit.

Our company’s charter redefines ownership in two ways:

1) Ownership = Entrepreneurship

Voting rights always belong to those who lead the company and are responsible for it. If a founder leaves the startup, she must transfer her control rights (ownership) to a successor, who is committed to the purpose and the ideals of the company.

2) Profit = Means, not an end in itself

Voting rights (company ownership) are not connected to dividends rights. Investors receive fair dividend rights (or fair interest rates) but no voting rights. We believe profits should be seeds for the future, not as end in itself.

Two institutions are helping us achieve legally:

1) Purpose Foundation: retains 1% of each company with veto power over changes to those points above, which ensure our understanding of self-ownership is guarded.

2) Purpose Fund: a capped dividend evergreen fund focused on companies that adopt self-ownership (purpose ownership). It is focused on exploring the future of finance and ownership for a decentralised and more bottom-up economy.

If you made it this far, +1. We look forward to meeting you soon. ❤

Please apply under: connect@coliga.de