Product Design Lead, The Athletic
Contract
The hourly rate for this role will be $80.00 / Hour.
Subscription based publisher of sports content
Be an early applicant
Subscription based publisher of sports content
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
The hourly rate for this role will be $80.00 / Hour.
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To produce smarter coverage for die-hard fans and redefine the way fans get access to sports content by flipping the normal model for sports journalism.
Role
Who you are
- 7+ years of relevant product design experience at a fast-growing consumer company (subscription business is a big plus)
- Experience working on cross-functional teams
- Experience developing great user experiences, and an ability to empathize with users
- Experience supporting the design process by creating user flows, wireframes, UI designs, prototypes, and establishing/maintaining design systems
- Experience leading and integrating user testing, research, and insights
- Ability to manage your time across several workstreams
- Excellent Figma and prototyping skills
- Cross-discipline fluency. You know how to break down big challenges into smaller decisions framed as trade-offs (e.g. time vs. scope)
- Strong visual and typographic sensibility
- Enthusiasm for The Athletic
- Ability to think at a high level about product and feature strategy but also act with speed and precision to actualize projects
What the job involves
- This is a fixed term contract for leave coverage. The duration will be from 8/4/2025 to 9/26/2025
- The Athletic has changed the way sports fans follow their favorite teams and leagues. Our product team works at the intersection of our engineering, design, and data teams, as well as The Athletic’s Newsroom, the largest in sports media
- Our Product Design team strives to craft sports experiences that blend technology with world class sports journalism. As Lead Product Designer on the Growth team, you will drive the creation of impactful consumer-facing features, experiences, and experiments across Web, iOS, and Android platforms that help bring our world-class sports coverage to new users and deepen all readers’ engagement with The Athletic
- You will collaborate with researchers as well as other designers on our Growth team and help ensure consistency and continuity across all Growth focus areas. Your design leadership and user-centric perspective plays a critical part in the success of our entire Growth team
- Design world class experience for The Athletic’s users across our mobile apps and website
- Collaborate with the product team to create wireframes, visuals, and prototypes that contribute to new and ongoing features
- Work through product problems from definition and opportunity to shipping features to our subscribers
- Collaborate with the extended Product Design team to work within, contribute to, and maintain our design system
- Operate as a leader on the design team, contributing to product strategy and roadmap
- Collaborate with user researchers to identify areas of focus, plan out research sessions, and incorporate user insights into product work
- Present design solutions to cross-functional partners and company executives, defend design decisions, and incorporate feedback into the design cycle
- Work across multiple cross-functional teams, partnering with Product Managers, Engineers, GMs, Analysts, and company executives on taking concepts from ideation to execution
- Deliver high fidelity mobile app and web designs to the engineering teams. Work with engineers to ensure the visual quality of what we release
- Communicate the progress and outcome of your work to your teammates and peers
Our take
The Athletic provides authentic, in-depth coverage written by journalists who know the teams they write about inside out. Its model bucks the trend of traditional sports journalism outfits by asking for a subscription rather than relying on ad-revenue.
Despite initial doubts that users would be willing to pay for sports journalistic content, the Athletic has found significant success and was acquired by the New York times in 2022.
This collaboration was criticised at the time by investors who believed that the Athletic was undersold. However, despite The Athletic operating at a loss since the takeover, it's clear that the New York Times perceives the subscription magazine as a long-term investment, predicting that it will be operating at a profit within the next 4 years. This will be aided by accelerated customer growth and the growing trend of subscription-based sports news.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Jan 2020
$50m
SERIES D
May 2019
$21.8m
SERIES C
Total funding: $139.5m
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Adam Hansmann
(President & Co-Founder)Previously a McKinsey Business Analyst and then Associate at Calera Capital.
Alex Mather
(CEO & Co-Founder)Vice President at startup building a community for athletes called Strava before founding The Athletic
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