Product Designer, Top Hat
+ Stock Options
Interactive software for higher education
Open for applications
Interactive software for higher education
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
+ Stock Options
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To empower educators to engage students and unleash their potential.
Role
Who you are
- Minimum of 1-3 years of experience working as a product designer (or similar role: UX Designer, Visual Designer, etc.)
- You’ve experienced the full design process ~2-3 times (including school work!): you’ve understood people, defined problems, iterated on concepts, and shipped solutions
- You have a good intuition for visual design: you know how to use typography/colour/spacing to lay out an interface and understand how these decisions relate to a great user experience
- You’re excited about designing accessible products: you have exposure to the ideas of inclusive design and are excited to build interfaces that work for everyone. Familiarity with WCAG 2.1 AA is a plus
- You take initiative beyond your role: you’re excited to grow your craft beyond your day-to-day work and have examples where you’ve made this happen
Desirable
- Experience maintaining design systems: you’ve helped systematize design in your current role and are excited to grow your capabilities in this space
- Comfort with interaction design: you’re able to look beyond just screens and think through the details of more complex (and often non-linear) interactions and animations
- Excited about usability: you’re interested in applying common useability heuristics to your designs or conducting useability benchmarks
What the job involves
- We are looking for a Product Designer to join our team at Top Hat. You’ll get to work across the entire design process: problem identification, user research, concept design, and implementation.
- Along the way, you’ll also have the opportunity to build your craft by working with Senior Product Designers & Managers on our growing team
- The challenges you’ll get to explore are nuanced & complex: more than 3 million students are enrolled in courses using Top Hat at 750 of the top 1,000 higher ed institutions in North America
- Spend lots of time with professors and students: hearing from them directly about their challenges and aspirations
- Collaborate with product managers often: articulating which problems are worth solving and finding solutions
- Iterate on concepts: exploring lots of ideas in a low & high fidelity while getting feedback from designers, your team, and users
- Ship features often: collaborating directly with engineers to ensure your designs are built to a high standard of quality
- Evolve our team: work with the rest of our design organization to improve our processes and design systems
Our take
Top Hat is at the apex of two major trends in education: the digitisation of platforms for content and the rising costs of higher education for students. By digitising work largely created by professors, Top Hat has delivered engaging content at lower cost for students across Canada and North America.
Where traditional publishers relied on analogue processes to provide high-quality but largely unengaging, uninteractive and expensive textbooks, Top Hat marketed the platform to professors to publish their own interactive multimedia online textbooks. This gave them a cut and built a holistic student experience on top.
The product has now had so much success that Top Hat’s strategy has evolved to buying those conventional publishers of postsecondary course materials. Now they can shift those quality materials into digitally distributed versions and make them available on a digitized subscription basis.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Feb 2021
$130m
SERIES E
Feb 2020
$55m
SERIES D
Total funding: $234.9m
Company benefits
- A noble mission that creates meaningful, fulfilling work
- A team that cares deeply for customers and for each other
- Professional learning and development for all role levels
- The latest and greatest technology to do your job
- An awesome and welcoming Toronto HQ
- Competitive benefits and health/lifestyle spending accounts
- We’re currently embracing an engaging, remote-first culture and work experience
- A management team focused on performance, growth, engagement and connection
- Employee-led, exec sponsored employee resource groups
Company values
- Good In The Woods - We believe that our success depends on being agile, resourceful and brave—no matter how great the challenge.
- There Is No 'I' In Top Hat - We believe that teamwork is the key to meeting our goals. We work hard, we work smart and we work without ego.
- Aggressive Growth - We believe in moving fast and aiming high, and that our company’s growth will revolutionize higher education
- Treat Professors Like Heroes - We believe professors should be celebrated for their contributions to higher education
Company HQ
Downtown Toronto, Toronto, ON
Articles
Leadership
Joe Rohrlich
(CEO, not founder)Prior to joining Top Hat, Rohrlich led a range of customer and go-to-market teams during his 11-year tenure at Bazaarvoice, the market leader in SaaS user-generated content solutions for eCommerce. Before that, Rohrlich led account management at a Procter & Gamble-owned marketing consultancy.
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