Director, Product Design

As a Product Design Director, you will play a crucial role in shaping the vision for next-generation news experiences across Hearst’s portfolio of newspapers. Collaborating closely with Product Managers, Engineers, and other cross-functional partners, you will drive the delivery of highly crafted, user-centered products, ensuring the team delivers measurable business value while surprising and delighting our users. In this role, you will lead the evolution of Product Design into an AI-enabled practice, identifying opportunities to improve product quality, accelerate delivery, automate repetitive workflows, and enable designers to work closer to production. You will also serve as a discipline lead for the product design function at HNP, mentoring junior designers and providing ongoing feedback through crits and reviews—while independently leading complex, high-profile projects across a broad portfolio of products. Ultimately, you will be responsible for setting and raising the bar fo ###### Director, Product Design - Hearst Newspapers **Location:** NYC (Hybrid, minimum 3 days in office) **About Hearst Newspapers** With more than 3,000 employees across the nation, Hearst Newspapers publishes 28 dailies and 52 weeklies, including the Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, Austin American Statesman, San Antonio Express-News, Albany Times Union, and CT Insider. It is our singular mission to be the most trusted, most respected, and most accurate source of news and information in the communities we serve. We place our readers' interests above all others, dedicating ourselves to the principles of truthfulness, fairness, and independence. We understand that the free flow of accurate information is vital to our democracy and economy. **About the Product Team** The Hearst Newspapers Product team delivers **best-in-class product experiences that balance editorial, business, and audience needs, and guides product strategy to enable future products and services**. Our team includes engineers, DevOps, QA, product managers, strategists, designers, and product operations specialists. We are organized into cross-functional pods supporting end users, internal users, and revenue growth, working closely with Content and Revenue teams. **What You'll Do:** As a Product Design Director, you will play a crucial role in shaping the vision for next-generation news experiences across Hearst’s portfolio of newspapers. Collaborating closely with Product Managers, Engineers, and other cross-functional partners, you will drive the delivery of highly crafted, user-centered products, ensuring the team delivers measurable business value while surprising and delighting our users. In this role, you will lead the evolution of Product Design into an AI-enabled practice, identifying opportunities to improve product quality, accelerate delivery, automate repetitive workflows, and enable designers to work closer to production. You will also serve as a discipline lead for the product design function at HNP, mentoring junior designers and providing ongoing feedback through crits and reviews—while independently leading complex, high-profile projects across a broad portfolio of products. Ultimately, you will be responsible for setting and raising the bar for design quality across our portfolio of digital products. **Key responsibilities include:** - Collaborate with newsrooms, revenue teams and other strategic functions to develop product concepts. - Partner with Product and Engineering to shape AI-powered product experiences, applying sound UX principles around transparency, trust, human oversight, and responsible use of AI. - Execute detailed design work with precision and a high degree of craft and rigor - Leverage user research and market insights to inform design strategies - Identify opportunities for leveling up the design of our current products, initiating and driving new design-led workstreams to completion. - Work within an establishe…