Growing our team and product offering in 2021
We’ve got big plans and we’ll need some more hands on deck to deliver them.
2020 was a strange year, and in many ways, 2021 may be much the same — the difference is, we’ve adjusted now and we’re ready for it this time round. For us at UsabilityHub, we spent 2020 learning, strategizing and maturing our processes, culminating in an exciting annual planning in Q4. The result of that planning is an ambitious roadmap and matching hiring plan, putting us on track for a year of growth and innovation in 2021.
Where we’re going
UsabilityHub has helped designers test their ideas with real people since 2011 — that’s ten years ago. A lot has changed since then, both in the competitor landscape and the needs of our customers.
In 2021, our product roadmap is two-pronged — serving our customers and making our product more competitive.
Firstly, we want to serve our customers’ needs more effectively by making sure we are up to speed with current technologies, workflows and research techniques. This will mean building features that are highly requested that make sense to support UX and UI designers in 2021.
Secondly, we plan to meet our competitors and make sure our customers can get what they need from us rather than having to hold multiple subscriptions or leave us for someone who offers more.
There is obviously a lot of crossover within those two goals, but the sets are not entirely overlapping.
While we deliver on this ambitious roadmap, we are also hoping to ramp up our marketing and sales approaches to make sure all this good work doesn’t go unnoticed.
As you can see, 2021’s going to be big, so we’re hiring for a few new roles.
Who we need
Senior full-stack engineer
Senior full-stack engineers drive the development and delivery of critical features in our product suite, as well as proactively developing foundations and initiatives to help our platform scale as the product and team grows.
You’ll be responsible for the architecture, implementation and maintenance of our software across all product areas. You’ll work closely with the design, product management and support teams, providing technical input and technical support as needed.
Ideally you’re a generalist who is capable across back-end (Ruby, Rails, Postgres) and front-end (React/Redux/Typescript), but if you specialize in one area and are still getting up to speed in the other, don’t let that dissuade you from applying. It’s more meaningful to us that you’re a great developer and a keen learner.
Senior UX designer
You will drive the design activities for major features, enabling the product team to leverage customer and user insights to develop human-centered features for and improvements to our product suite.
As a senior UX designer, the focus of your role will be to lead the design of new features by combining findings from research and human-centered design principles with collaborative design activities in varying levels of fidelity, depending on the relative risk of the project.
The design focus is primarily UI, secondarily requirements/scope, and then research. The approach must be deeply pragmatic, lean and collaborative. You’ll be part of a cross-functional Agile/Scrum product team, participating in all rituals as required. As we grow (with your help), there will be exciting potential for your role to increase in scope or seniority, either on a technical or management track.
Growth marketer
As the growth marketer for our bootstrapped global SaaS company, you’ll help us optimize our entire funnel and achieve our growth and revenue goals by developing strategic plans and executing marketing activities across various channels. You’ll play a leading role in the establishment of our marketing function while operating within the product team, and as we grow (with your help), there will be exciting potential for your role to increase in scope or seniority, either on a technical or management track.
With an initial focus on product marketing, you’ll work within the product team to effectively communicate our product and brand via our website and multi-channel onboarding. In collaboration with CX and Sales, you’ll assist with promoting customer-facing product improvements to our existing and potential customers among other campaigns to increase acquisition and engagement. You’ll also manage and monitor our social media channels, both strategically and day to day. You may leverage your experience with tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude & Hubspot to build a data-led approach.
Account executive
Applications have now closed for this position.
Working at UsabilityHub
UsabilityHub is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status.
Our head office is in Melbourne, Australia, and our product team is currently all based in Victoria. We are hoping to be back in the office at least every now and then soon, so Melbourne is our preference. We are open to folks who are in compatible timezones too. (Sorry, Northern hemisphere friends.)
Our team is great. We have a lot of very smart, talented people working here, and the culture is warm, collaborative and very honest and authentic. We bring our whole selves to work, and we reward vulnerability, openness and trust.
We enjoy a good laugh, as well as the occasional beer. Over COVID we’ve had picnics in the park, online games, Dungeons & Dragons sessions and shared playlists because we genuinely enjoy each others’ company.
Our values are woven in to our ways of working and we hold each other accountable to them regularly. Our values are:
- Do more with less
- Optimise for fulfilment
- Succeed as a team
- Embrace transparency
- Strive to always be better.
Our hiring process
We’ve developed a hiring process that we think is fair, unbiased and values-driven.
Our roles are advertised on LinkedIn and on our website, and to apply we ask that you fill out a simple form with your name, email, LinkedIn, resume and cover letter. All those applications are then screened and we choose from there who we would like to speak to.
If we want to get to know you better, we do a half hour screener call (on Zoom, at the moment, to be COVID-safe) with someone from our team — possibly your manager-to-be, but it could be anyone from the CEO to a prospective colleague. In the screener, we ask you four questions:
- What are your career goals?
- What are you really good at professionally?
- What are you not good at, or not interested in doing professionally?
- Who were your last five bosses, and how will they each rate your performance on a 1–10 scale when we talk to them?
If the conversation has gone well, you’ll also be able to ask us any questions you have about the role, company, or manager.
If we proceed from this stage, we’ll send you our company handbook for you to start getting to know us better and schedule a technical interview, where your manager-to-be will deep dive on 2–3 projects where you contributed in ways that are relevant to the role description. The technical interview goes for up to 2 hours, also on Zoom.
Finally, if you pass the technical interview, we do a final interview, where you will meet some more team members and we go deep on your employment history, focusing more holistically on you as a team contributor. We will be looking for alignment of values and what you can bring to our team, and the interview takes usually around 2–3 hours.
If this goes well, we’ll do reference checks. Assuming everyone says glowing things about you, we’ll confirm your starting salary, send you a contract and decide on a start date.
Onboarding for the product team may be accompanied but a more specific onboarding for another team (like a development team onboarding in addition to product team onboarding).
You’ll meet with various team members to understand what they do and how things came to be the way they are, and your manager will lead you through our ways of working and product offerings. We’ll bring you into all the meetings and projects quickly, but you’ll be ramped up in terms of your contribution over about 10 weeks. No swag, no fluff — just giving you all the tools and information you need to hit the ground running and be successful in your new role.
Join us
If you like the sound of any of these roles, our company and ways of working, we’d love to hear from you. These are the roles we are hiring for in Q1, but we expect more to open up over the course of 2021 as well. As a bootstrapped company, we are growing mindfully and within our means.
To find out about roles as they emerge, you can check our careers page, or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.
