Staff Designer - Global Participation at Twitter

Location: Ghana (Remote)
Team: Product and Design

The Position

• Twitter is looking for a highly entrepreneurial Staff Designer to help establish a bespoke product strategy for Twitter in Africa and execute against it with support from a dedicated local team. Ghana and Nigeria will be the first countries in Africa in which we pilot this new approach of building an in-market team to locally tailor our global product to the needs of a specific region.

Twitter’s Discovery and Connection Team:

• The Discovery and Connection Team (D&C) supports people at the beginning part of their journey with Twitter. New and returning people visit Twitter for fresh and timely content and stay when they connect with a community and/or passion. Our charter is to craft a sense of belonging for everyone on Twitter by helping them connect with people, interests and passions. For Global Participation, belonging takes on new meaning as we aspire to tailor the full Twitter experience for new markets.
• The Design and Research organization works with a set of 8 principles in mind. It’s our mission to uphold these principles and have them reflected in the experiences Twitter design and build.  
• Stand for people: From helping people stay informed to engaging in the public conversation to growing their businesses, always advocate for what is best for the people Twitter serves.
• Live in culture: Be immersed in and inspired by culture and counterculture.
• Set standards & break records: Strive for greatness. Don’t shortchange, shortcut, or settle.
• Work out loud: Share your work and your point of view. Create generously. Be transparent.
• Real talk: Give direct, honest, timely feedback that meets people where they are—and helps them along their professional journey.
• Always be learning: Run toward what you don't know.
• Own it: Be responsible for your work, and accountable for the impact it has on other teams and those Twitter serve. Bias toward action. Be decisive. Optimize to fail quickly, and iterate.
• Soar:  Bias toward action. Be decisive. Optimize to fail quickly, and iterate.

What You’ll Do

• As Staff Designer, you will help us customise the Twitter experience to best meet the needs of our customers in Africa.
• You’ll use your deep understanding of the unique ways that people use Twitter in Africa starting with Ghana and Nigeria to highlight gaps in our global product strategy and ensure that Twitter is successful and locally relevant across the region.
• You’ll work with a horizontal cross-functional team covering everything from engineering to business development and product marketing to make this happen, which will be dedicated to this work.

Who You Are

• Twitter is looking for someone who has proven success in collaborating to achieve product-market fit with consumer products in Africa with specialization in West African markets such as Ghana and Nigeria, either through a new venture or within a larger company.
• You’ll be experienced with partnering with researchers to gain local insights and translating these insights into products that people love. You have a strong, customer-centric approach to product design and have repeatedly used this to deliver past successes. You are a rare blend of product management, product design and engineering.

If this sounds like it might be you, you probably have:

• An ability to develop a deep understanding and empathy for customers whose daily life, circumstances and needs might be very different than your own.
• A strong quantitative and qualitative background to support data-informed decision-making.
• Excellent interpersonal skills which allow you to excel at collaborating with your team and connect with the customers that you’re serving.
• Demonstrated success working in a resource-constrained, highly-ambiguous environment, such as at a startup or new venture.
• A willingness to travel to spend time with your customers and our product teams around the world.
• An ability to leverage systems thinking in your approach to solving problems quickly and efficiently.
• Proficiency in understanding technical constraints and working with Engineering counterparts to find ways to take designs from concepts to production scale.

Qualifications

• Experience driving product strategy in collaboration with Product and Engineering leaders.
• Experience working in startups or on highly ambitious zero-to-one projects.
• Proficiency in at least one local language in West Africa region
• 5+ years of experience with user interfaces, interaction paradigms, and visual design patterns as well as experience with a wide variety of software engineering tools and practices.
• Experience prototyping user interfaces for Android, prototyping for iOS using Swift or Objective-C, SwiftUI or UIKit, and building with web technologies (React/JS) are all a plus.
• Strong understanding of accessibility best practices for design and software development.
• You’ve designed end to end product experiences for web and mobile applications.
• You understand software engineering best practices, including agile development, code reviews, design documentation, debugging, and troubleshooting.
• Great communication skills - you’re able to clearly articulate ideas and collaborate with designers, product managers, engineers, and researchers to drive progress.
• Growth mindset and a desire to learn, teach, and mentor.