Lead Product Designer, FareHarbor
Booking solutions for tour operators
Posted today
Booking solutions for tour operators
501-1000 employees
Posted today
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To make experiences better for everyone.
Role
Who you are
- A seasoned design leader with a strong track record of shaping product strategy, mentoring teams, and driving cross-functional collaboration
- Thrives in fast-paced environments, balancing user needs with business goals. Bonus if experienced in SaaS or the travel industry
- Deep expertise in UX, UI, interaction, and visual design, with a solid foundation in UX research
- Skilled at scaling design systems to support consistency and speed across complex product surfaces
- Proven ability to build, lead, and inspire high-performing product design teams
What the job involves
- A Lead Product Designer operates across two product pillars, guiding a group of 3 to 6 product designers
- They are responsible for defining the future-state experience vision for their pillars, ensuring cross-team coherence and strategic alignment, and driving design quality and usability across product teams
- Ultimately, this role is accountable for the overall usability of our digital experiences, playing a key part in building the right thing—and building it right
- Accountable for:
- Defining the future-state experience vision for their product pillars
- Ensuring cross-team coherence, strategy alignment, and usability
- Design quality and impact across product teams within their pillars
- Design Vision & Strategy
- Envisioning: Create and maintain north-star experience visions aligned with product and company goals
- Design artefacts: Lead key design artefacts—like design principles, flowcharts, and journey maps—to guide teams, align efforts, and improve user experience across product teams
- Goal Setting: Establish clear, challenging, and measurable goals (OKRs) for Product Design, aligned with pillar objectives, and track progress
- Product Cohesion and Usability:
- Quality at Scale: Provide clear, usability-focused feedback to help designers create polished, usable designs
- Define practical standards for what ‘good enough’ means, empowering product designers to confidently decide when a design is ready to ship and meets quality expectations
- Promote a culture of open design critiques within the safe, supportive space of the chapters
- Coherence at scale: Drive design cohesion at scale by promoting consistent use of the design system, patterns, and guidelines
- Partner with the design system team to evolve and innovate the system, balancing consistency with flexibility to enable usability and innovation across products
- Strategic Planning & Resourcing:
- Design capacity: Ensures optimal utilization of design capacity, signals (latent) design capacity needs and drive capacity fulfillment (candidate selection, interviews, onboarding)
- Scoping & Planning: Partner with product and engineering pillar leadership to scope, plan and de-risk strategic design initiatives, ensuring cross-team initiatives are well-defined and have stakeholder agreement
- Oversee roadmap project scoping and planning to mitigate risks
- Resource Allocation & Workload Management: Coordinate workloads and allocate design resources to meet project needs within the pillars
- Team Leadership & Management:
- Performance Management: Manage a fair, accurate and helpful performance cycle, setting clear goals, providing continuous feedback, and ensuring alignment
- Mentorship & Growth: Guide and develop the professional growth of Product Designers through mentorship, actionable feedback, and opportunities for skill enhancement
- Team Morale: Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and innovative team culture that encourages creativity, experimentation, and accountability
- Team Rituals: Coordinate and lead regular team rituals (e.g. , weekly meetings, design reviews, brainstorming sessions, retrospectives) to ensure communication, alignment, and continuous learning for their team
- These rituals create opportunities for feedback, encourage collaboration, and keep the team focused on shared goals
- Client and end-customer understanding:
- Usability Testing, Validation & Feedback: Partner with the pillar’s UX Researcher to build a culture of continuous discovery
- Test early and often using clear hypotheses and feedback from users and stakeholders, while encouraging product designers to conduct their own evaluative research under the UX Researcher’s guidance
- Design Ops:
- Org: Partner with Design Ops to clarify roles and responsibilities, team structures, and growth frameworks that support career development and pillar needs
- Way of working: Partner with Design Ops to embed tooling, rituals, and ways of working for cohesive, efficient, and high-quality design across pillars
- Advocacy & Stakeholder Management:
- Stakeholder Management: Form a trifecta with GPMs and EMs to enable strong cross-functional leadership and decision making within the assigned pillars
- Showcasing Design Impact: Demonstrate the impact of design on key product outcomes
- Use case studies to highlight how design decisions drive measurable product outcomes
- Culture Shaping: Promote a design and user-centric culture within the organization
Our take
Most holidaygoers in the US prefer to book their activities and experiences online - but when it comes to local operators, this isn’t always possible. FareHarbor has been developing software to help digitize the booking process for these smaller businesses, and over a decade, has brought more than 5,000 of them onto the books.
Along the way, FareHarbor also built up some strong momentum in the reservation management and distribution areas of the sector, which drove up the company’s valuation - making it a prime candidate for acquisition. Whilst TripAdvisor reportedly made multiple bids, FareHarbor ultimately went to Booking Holdings, the US’ largest vendor of tour company booking software.
This puts FareHarbor in a strong position. Booking Holdings is acquiring companies at a steep rate (ten in the last ten years), and good ones too - Kayak and Venga number among them. This will help FareHarbor with customer acquisition, and insulate it somewhat from any wobbles in the hospitality sector.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
8% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (1 round)
May 2015
$0.2m
SEED
Total funding: $0.2m
Company HQ
Grachtengordel-Zuid, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Leadership
Matt Broten
(Software Engineer)Worked in various Software Engineering roles at Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, University of Minnesota, Open Systems International, Instant Automatic, and Artery- which they also co-founded.
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