Design Director, LawnStarter
$160-200k
+ Equity
Lawn maintenance marketplace
Be an early applicant
Lawn maintenance marketplace
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$160-200k
+ Equity
201-500 employees
Company mission
To make life easier and enable people to save their time for what really matters. They are setting out to make running a home services business dead simple.
Role
Who you are
- With a current small team of 4 members, you will need to be able to navigate between strategic decision making, people management, and operational work
- You have 7+ years of experience in design at technology companies and at least a few years of leadership experience. Bonus if you have a diverse design experience w/ product and service design, and user research
- You are ready to lead and develop exceptional people, helping them be their best selves. You create an environment where people are excited about achieving more each day, with intellectual honesty and trust across the team
- You take pride in understanding problems deeply and asking the right questions. You can absorb a variety of topics with extreme ease, having a structured and logical approach to developing your understanding of the business and its challenges.
- You set extremely high standards for yourself and others around you. When you say something is getting done, the team can trust you. You don’t tolerate mediocrity, but you also dedicate your time to helping others evolve and learn so that the team can operate at a higher level
- You also understand that often true differentiation only comes from executing well on very hard things, so you don’t shy away from challenges. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you don’t have a track record of impressive performance
- You care deeply about understanding the user you are designing for and use a mix of user research techniques to gather that understanding. You are not afraid of talking to users, launching surveys, or looking at behavioural data
- You understand that in spite of the careful approach you take to understanding problems and identifying opportunities, you actively try not to be perfectionist or get yourself tied up in knots
- You have a bias for action in order to make progress. You enjoy being scrappy and constraints enthrall you. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you, by default, like building complete and full solutions from the get go
What the job involves
- As a Design Director at LawnStarter, you will be leading our path to a 5-star customer experience
- This is a position with high autonomy in which you will set the vision and processes related to our user research, branding, product design
- This is a high leverage role, with exposure to our entire leadership team and responsibility to drive results
- Your main responsibility will be to improve our customer experience,collaborating to ensure we are providing great solutions to the right problems
- In order to do that, you will need to prioritize and solve challenges, which we have plenty of, such as:
- Design as a value driver:
- We are a technology company that partners with local pros to deliver local services
- This means a great user experience depends on UI design but also on service design, incentives design, and so much more
- It’s an intricate business and every detail has ripple effects that are often hard to predict and even harder without great design practices and product taste
- We are also a small team, with just 4 designers (your team), to cover a lot of surface area
- How can we set a high bar for what’s a great user experience
- How can we get every designer and every initiative to hit that bar
- How can we do that while moving fast
- What tools, processes, libraries, AI workflows, etc, can we leverage in order to move faster and better?
- Understand customers and pros:
- We believe delighting consumers starts with deeply understanding them
- Currently, we have spread out efforts to understand our customers across the organization, with no central repository or method to institutionalize learnings
- How can we systematize learning about our customers and pros
- How can we ensure that interviews, surveys, and other research methods are being applied with best practices in mind?
- Multi-brand strategy:
- We currently own three brands - LawnStarter, Lawn Love, and HomeGnome, and might not stop there
- This allows us to increase our marketing reach while offering slightly different versions of the same product
- How do we ensure alignment between what we market, how we present it, and what we deliver, for each brand
- How do we ensure a good balance between brands complementing each other while not competing too much with each other
- Customers can feel when a brand is not well rounded, with promises that don’t match delivery, and it impacts retention, referrals and overall image
Our take
When it comes to lawn maintenance, many homeowners typically have to deal with several contractors. This can make lawn care more complicated and expensive than it needs to be. LawnStarter solves this problem by aggregating lawn mowing, fertilizing, and maintenance into one convenient purchase point.
As a marketplace, LawnStarter focuses on helping existing lawn care businesses grow, rather than trying to push their own services. This differentiates them from other providers. The company has seen impressive growth since it was first founded, and it now operates in 120 cities around the US. According to LawnStarter's CEO, the company's revenue has grown at a rate of 100% a year since its inception.
To date, LawnStarter has raised around $18 million in funding and surpassed $100 million in bookings, which is a testament to investors' and customers' confidence in the product. This confidence will be instrumental to LawnStarter's future success, as the lawn care market has grown increasingly competitive in recent years.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
25% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Nov 2019
$10.5m
EARLY VC
Jun 2015
$6m
SERIES A
Total funding: $17.8m
Company benefits
- Flexible remote schedule
Company HQ
Financial District, Austin, TX
Leadership
Steve Corcoran
(Co-Founder)Previously co-founded SigmaBits, and served as Co-CEO of SEED.
Ryan Farley
(Co-Founder)Previously worked as a Senior Business Analyst in Capital One's Card Partnerships Analytics team.
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