Product Design Lead
Edacious
Product, Design
Marlborough, MA, USA
Posted on Thursday, April 18, 2024
A New Food System in which Quantity & Quality can Coexist
Our food systems produce more calories than society needs and are incentivized to yield the greatest quantity of food at the lowest possible cost. We have succeeded in optimizing a single outcome - a calorie rich world. But success has come at a huge toll: a global, multifaceted environmental and health crisis. 25%+ of global GHG emissions are generated from farm to fork and the negative impacts of agriculture, food production and land-use on climate cost us $3 trillion USD per year. Meanwhile, our current diets are responsible for a 70% increase in obesity affecting 1.5Bn people, and the costs of diet-related chronic diseases (heart disease, diabetes, cancer) amount to $13 trillion/year.
At Edacious, we believe food should be plentiful AND nutritious. As the impacts of yield-obsessed food production on human and environmental health become clear, the ability to measure nutrition as easily as we measure yield becomes critical. Why? There's mounting scientific evidence that the healthiest foods come from farming practices that are best for the planet and the most nutritious food is also the most flavorful and sustainable. Our vision is to shift the food system so it may better serve consumers, producers, and our planet and our mission is nutritional transparency.
Measuring & Comparing Food Quality Through a Nutrition & Climate Lens
Edacious is a multi-disciplinary technology company. We are chemists, designers, engineers, and systems-thinkers who believe that nutrition can be used as a lever to impact climate change at scale by accelerating the production and demand for healthier, climate-smart foods. To achieve this, we create novel analysis tools and generate actionable data for producers to understand the factors behind more nutritious food providing a roadmap to improve their operations and for buyers to know the nutritional quality of the food they purchase so they can make better decisions for their health, wallets and the environment.
Edacious was co-founded by Eric Smith in 2022. Eric has spent his career working at the intersection of economics and nature. He was previously the director of the venture capital vehicle Neglected Climate Opportunities (NCO) at the Grantham Environmental Trust, where he co-led over 40 direct investments in start-ups across all stages that remove carbon and GHG at scale. Before that, he was with SJF Ventures and worked for BlackRock on climate finance. Edacious has garnered the backing of solid investors such as Elemental Excelerator, Grantham’s Neglected Climate Opportunities and Tin Shed Ventures, the venture arm of Patagonia and the Nest Family Office of Belgium.
Position Overview
We're looking for a design lead who's excited to wear many hats, and is motivated by solving hard problems for real people (in this case: farmers, food producers, and eaters everywhere).
Come help us build a design team that exists to illuminate the connections between climate, agriculture, nutrition, and human health. You’ll play a critical role in shaping a company where design strategy permeates everything we do, and helps the entire team ship work we’re all proud of.
This role is for a very senior individual contributor. You might have been a senior, staff, or principal designer in the past. You’ll be the second designer on the team, reporting into Alex Turnwall (Linkedin), our Head of Product and Design. The work is heavily UX and UI focused, with the expectation that you’ll be able to manage your own projects from concept to launch, bringing in our highly collaborative cross-functional teams to help when needed.
The right person is probably excited about learning in-depth food science concepts from our team—it’ll be your job to translate complex topics into products that the public can benefit from. You’re passionate about food, health, climate and/or agriculture.
While we understand the value of specialization in UX roles, we’re looking for an intentional generalist who will spend time on UI and systems design in Figma, but can flex into user research and product management. A stand-out candidate will be excited about contributing to overall product, marketing, content, and brand strategy.
Design at Edacious
We’re a software, hardware, and science company. Our tools make measurement, comparison, and understanding of food quality more accessible through a nutrition and climate lens. Great design is not only a key differentiator: we view making complex topics digestible (pun intended) through design storytelling as critical to our success.
Why we exist: there's mounting scientific evidence that the healthiest foods come from the farming practices that are best for the planet. We believe that we can use nutrition as a lever to impact climate change at scale by accelerating the demand for healthier, climate-smart foods and activate regenerative agriculture as a climate solution. In the process, we’ll help people make better health decisions, and help food producers improve their operations—both having a positive impact on climate and food system resilience.
What you're designing: we make software that takes big data from our lab and other sources and presents it to food and agriculture professionals so that they can (1) improve quality and (2) tell the story of how good their food really is. You’ll have a hand in designing software, data visualizations, services, and brand content.
Our users: are farmers and other people working in the supply chain to bring food to your table. In serving them, we also have to think about the needs of their end consumers (so, literally everybody that eats).
Our team: you'd be working daily with a team of scientists, ag professionals, and seasoned software startup folks—a pretty unique group who are excited to teach and learn from each other every day.
The role: what you'd be doing
- A regular week involves working closely with everyone from our lab and science team, to our customers, to our CEO, to our software team to help shape the future of our product and services.
- Overall: UX and UI design for a responsive web app; plus user research, service design, and product management.
- Evolve our software platform to help elevate good science through design and storytelling—translate data coming from our lab and other data sets into something that users can understand and make actionable.
- Meet with our customers and partners (mostly virtual calls, opportunity to go on-site from time to time if you’re interested) to understand their problems and translate those to possible product solutions.
- Present solution concepts to key stakeholders internally, gain support for new directions and define success metrics—then be prepared to manage that project.
- Design crits! Design is a team sport here—you’ll work with our full team to review designs collaboratively and push concepts forward. We encourage everyone to “put their designer hat on” and give feedback—the whole company regularly works together in Figma and Figjam to review and comment on designs. As a design leader, you’ll need to lead these sessions and know when and how to direct feedback sessions from team members with different backgrounds.
- Help craft the end-to-end experience of getting food analyzed at our lab, to reporting via our software, to using the results. This may include improving our internal teams’ processes through service design and designing our internal tools.
- Help evolve and scale our internal design system (Figma) and brand.
Requirements: what we need to see
- Senior, staff, principal, or lead product designer with demonstrated experience working on complex software projects (see application and interview section below).
- Experience designing UX and UI for complex software products, with portfolio projects that demonstrate your personal input on improving UX.
- Extensive data visualization experience—you know how to avoid data distortion and help collaborators remove chartjunk.
- Leadership experience: not necessarily a people manager, but you’ve managed projects from ideation to launch. You can demonstrate that your leadership brought an idea to life, and you understand how to measure the impact of that project on users.
- Expert designer of responsive web applications for screens of all sizes.
- Experience working directly with software teams to hone and launch designs.
Ways to stand out
- Experience working in, or designing for applications in food, agriculture, nutrition, science.
- Startup experience—tell us how you made a tangible impact on a company or team.
- Experience designing, planning and executing qualitative user research studies; especially being able to independently manage the process and understanding how to interview to reduce bias.
- Bonus points for understanding how and when to design and conduct quant research.
- Bonus points for past coding experience—you won’t be doing that here, but understanding limitations of approaches makes you a better collaborator with our software team.
- Experience with service design—have you led processes to improve service experiences without visual design? Tell us about the process and outcomes.
Where and how you'd work
- You can choose where you work—this role is remote-first, but you must be based in the U.S. You should plan on overlapping with East Coast business hours.
- Our HQ, chemistry lab, and hardware space is in Marlborough, MA (about 45 minutes west of Boston) and you’re welcome to grab a desk there. The science team is onsite daily, and the product team is largely remote. You’ll be expected to travel to company events (usually in New England) about twice a year.
- We’re committed to building a remote-first design team that gets together when we need to. We’re built on Slack, Figma, GitHub, and Google workspace.
Benefits
- $160,000-$190,000 depending on qualifications, experience, and equity.
- Equity: 0.2-0.5%, depending on qualifications, experience, and salary.
- Flexible vacation policy.
- Paid holidays.
- Health, vision, and dental insurance.
- 401k with 4% company match.
Interview process
- Your application:
- There aren’t any interview assignments, but you’ll need to submit a portfolio link that captures your specific UX and UI input on projects. This can be a website, PDF, or even a shared Figma prototype.
- If you don't have an up-to-date portfolio, don't let that stop you from applying—throw together some good screen shots in a PDF or Figma file and add some text that tells us (1) what your role was, (2) what impact that project had.
- You also need to submit a “cover letter” that tells us why you want to work here and why you're the right person for the role. Open-ended. Make sure to capture our attention. You’ll copy/paste this directly into the online application form, so don’t worry about designing it.
- What's next?
- If your portfolio and resume look good, you'll be invited to a quick 25 min call with Alex, our Head of Product and Design, to ensure the role sounds like a good mutual fit. You’ll have the opportunity to ask your questions and tell us if you want to move forward.
- If so: expect a 1 hour "portfolio review" with a few members of our team. You present your portfolio work for 15-20 mins and we’ll ask a bunch of questions about your process, the challenges you solved, and the outcome for your users.
- Expect 2-4 additional 25 min calls with various members of the team. They'll be screening for: (1) collaboration with software folks, (2) collaboration with science folks, (3) overall problem-solving ability, and (4) overall company fit.
- A final interview with our Head of Product and Design to shore up any outstanding questions. Anywhere from 20-60 minutes.
Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
Diversity is the foundation of life and has created this beautiful world we live in. Just as nature has shown us the importance of diversity in biology, it is critical to build this diversity into our social structures. To the extent that we can build communities and teams that work in symbiotic and constructive ways, contributing to greater levels of productivity and resilience, the more successful we will be. We wish to attract diverse individuals in experience, perspective, and culture. Our company must represent the broader global food system if we are to be successful in this endeavor and so we seek to recruit and build teams that represent the beautiful diversity of people and life present on this planet.