Senior Manager, Product Design & User Experience Research (UXR)

Position Description:

ServiceTrade is seeking a Senior Manager of Product Design & User Experience Research (UXR) to lead and scale our end-to-end product design and research capabilities. This leader will be accountable for design strategy, UX research excellence, and the delivery of intuitive, high-impact experiences across our platform serving commercial service contractors and their customers.

In addition, this role will help spearhead the evolution of design in an AI-powered product organization—championing invisible design, exceptional attention to user experience, and rapid AI-driven prototyping. This leader will shape how ServiceTrade designs products in a world where intelligence is embedded, workflows are adaptive, and value is delivered through clarity, trust, and ease rather than surface-level features.

The Senior Manager will partner closely with Product Management, Engineering, Customer Success, and Marketing to translate customer needs and business strategy into elegant, usable, and differentiated product experiences. This role combines hands-on leadership with organizational design, coaching, and operational rigor to ensure design and research are embedded throughout the product development lifecycle—including fast-paced experimentation and AI-enabled discovery.

Key Responsibilities and Activities:

Design & Research Leadership

• Define and own the vision, principles, and standards for Product Design and UXR across ServiceTrade, including principles for AI-native and invisible design.
• Lead a team of product designers and UX researchers, setting clear expectations, goals, and development plans.
• Ensure consistent, high-quality interaction design, visual design, information architecture, and usability across the product portfolio.
• Champion customer-centered design practices, ensuring research insights meaningfully inform product strategy and roadmap decisions—especially as AI-driven capabilities are introduced and scaled.
• Establish how design contributes to trust, explainability, and confidence in AI-powered workflows.

User Experience Research (UXR)

• Establish and scale a rigorous UXR practice, including qualitative and quantitative research methodologies.
• Partner with Product and Data teams to define research priorities aligned to business outcomes and AI-driven use cases.
• Oversee user discovery, usability testing, journey mapping, and concept validation across the product lifecycle, including rapid validation of AI concepts and prototypes.
• Translate research findings into clear, actionable insights that guide both traditional product decisions and AI-assisted experiences.

Product Partnership & Execution

• Serve as a strategic partner to Product Management and Engineering to drive discovery, prioritization, and delivery.
• Embed design and research into agile product teams, ensuring early and continuous customer feedback.
• Lead fast, iterative prototyping—including low- and high-fidelity prototypes—to explore AI-enabled workflows and test assumptions quickly.
• Balance user needs, technical constraints, and business objectives to deliver impactful solutions where intelligence feels natural, supportive, and unobtrusive.
• Provide executive-ready narratives and artifacts (journey maps, prototypes, research readouts) to support decision-making in an increasingly AI-driven roadmap.

Design Systems & Operations

• Own and evolve the ServiceTrade design system, ensuring scalability, accessibility, and brand consistency across both traditional and AI-powered experiences.
• Define processes, tooling, and metrics to improve design efficiency, quality, and impact in a rapid experimentation environment.
• Establish best practices for accessibility, inclusive design, and usability standards—particularly as automation and AI are introduced into core workflows.
• Partner with Product Operations (if applicable) to improve intake, prioritization, and capacity planning for design and research work.

People Development & Culture

• Recruit, onboard, and retain top-tier design and research talent with strengths in systems thinking, experimentation, and AI-adjacent design.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, experimentation, and continuous improvement.
• Coach managers and senior ICs to grow their leadership, craft excellence, and business acumen in a modern AI product organization.
• Advocate for design and research as strategic capabilities—and as critical drivers of clarity, trust, and usability in AI-powered products.

Knowledge and Skills:

Required

• 6+ years of experience in product design, UX, or user research
• Experience designing AI 
• Inquisitive, entrepreneurial and adaptive
• Proven experience leading product design and/or UXR teams in a B2B SaaS environment.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating customer-centered problem solving, system-level thinking, and business impact.
• Deep understanding of modern product development practices (discovery, agile, dual-track).
• Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to influence executives and cross-functional partners.

Preferred

• Experience scaling design and research practices in a growth-stage SaaS company.
• Familiarity with complex, workflow-driven products (e.g., field service, construction tech, ERP, or operations platforms).
• Experience designing or prototyping AI-powered or data-driven product experiences.
• Experience building and maintaining design systems at scale.
• Working knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG) and inclusive design principles.

A few things you want to know:

What does ServiceTrade do?

Founded in 2012, ServiceTrade is the software platform for commercial mechanical and fire contractors. More than 1,300 contractors use ServiceTrade to increase profit and deliver more work during a persistent skilled labor shortage by improving service and project operations, helping technicians be more productive and do their best work, selling more service and inspection agreements, and growing customer loyalty. Over 10% of the commercial or industrial buildings in the United States are serviced by contractors using ServiceTrade to manage 13 million equipment assets and invoice more than $7.5 billion of service-related commerce. 

Ok, so why should I care about that?

Our customers are smart, hard-working people who we enjoy serving. We help them grow their business to earn more revenue, employ more blue-collar workers, and become more valuable to their customers. It’s why we get excited about serving a market that you might never have thought about before.

What kind of working environment do you have?

We’ve transitioned from a start-up to a scale-up -- that means we still have the spirit and energy of a start-up and are adding new people who will help us expand our business faster and run our business smarter. We have big ambitions and every employee understands our goals and what their role is in achieving them. Read about our company culture on our About Us page. 

What kind of benefits do you offer?

• Medical with Blue Cross Blue Shield NC (2 options)
• Dental and Vision with Unum 
• Company-paid Life insurance, STD and LTD 
• Voluntary benefits including Supplemental Life Insurance, HSA, FSA and Dependant Care, Critical Illness, Accident and Pet Insurance 
• 401(k) with up to 3% employer match and NO vesting period
• Flexible PTO policy
• 10 company holidays
• Parental Leave 
• Community Impact Program (Volunteer)
• Tech and Wellness Stipend

#LI-Remote

EEO Statement:
ServiceTrade provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

This employer participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S.

ServiceTrade is not registered to hire in all 50 states. You must reside in one of the states listed to be considered.
(AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, KY, MD, MI, MN, MO, NC, NH, NJ, NY, OH, OR, PA, SC, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA)

Please Be Aware of Recruiting Scams

To protect yourself against the increasing number of recruiting scams, please make sure that you are communicating with ServiceTrade. We communicate through our corporate website servicetrade.com, through corporate emails utilizing our domain name of @servicetrade.com, and through servicetrade.greenhouse.io. Be vigilant when checking domains because imitators often make very small changes to trick the eye. Additionally, please know that ServiceTrade does not use text messaging or public messaging platforms, such as Telegram or Whatsapp, to make initial contact with candidates and ServiceTrade will never ask an employment candidate for financial information or for payment of any kind.