Our Why
Datacom works with organisations and communities across Australia and New Zealand to make a difference in people’s lives and help organisations use the power of tech to innovate and grow.
About the role (your why)
As a Senior Product Designer, you’ll play a pivotal role in shaping intuitive, engaging experiences for our customers in our SaaS Payroll Product. You’ll work with a small team of designers and lead projects where you will design user-friendly interfaces for a complex technical product, making them feel effortless to use. Drawing on your expertise in user research, design thinking, and UI design, you’ll collect insights, evaluate user needs, and transform them into elegant, accessible, and highly functional interfaces. This is a chance to create a meaningful impact through design, making the complex simple and the technical human, while directly influencing how people experience one of the most critical tools in their working lives.
What you’ll bring
- At least 5 years of experience in product design, with a strong portfolio demonstrating end-to-end design thinking and delivery across digital products
- Confidence in leading design projects, guiding others through ambiguity, and shaping design direction within a small, collaborative team
- Payroll software is complicated, so we're looking for someone with strong systems thinking who can confidently navigate complex workflows and varied user states
- A strong desire to design useful and usable solutions, with a genuine passion for championing user needs. You’re enthusiastic about conducting customer research to deeply understand behaviours, pain points, and unmet needs, ensuring your design decisions are grounded in real user insight
- Deep knowledge of user-centred design methodologies and usability principles gained through hands-on experience
- A forward-thinking mindset with a passion for designing with AI in mind. You’re excited to explore emerging technologies, adapt to evolving tools, and embrace changes in processes to create smarter, more intuitive user experiences
- Confidence in contributing to and evolving a Design System. You’re comfortable working within established patterns while identifying opportunities to refine, extend, and improve the system as product needs grow and change
- Strong experience collaborating in agile environments and across multiple internal stakeholders. You communicate effectively with product, engineering, and business partners to deliver user-centred design solutions
- Eagerness to stay up to date with design industry trends and explore new tools. You’re curious, adaptable, and always looking for ways to improve your craft
- Conduct competitor analysis to identify industry trends, benchmark user experiences, and uncover opportunities to differentiate and improve product design
- Familiarity with project management principles and systems development lifecycles
- Proven time management skills, with the ability to deliver high-quality work across multiple projects simultaneously
- Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, including the ability to write clear, detailed documentation and design rationale
What you’ll do:
- Lead end-to-end experience design, from early ideation through to detailed and complex user flows
- Apply systems thinking to confidently design for multiple user roles and navigate complex problem spaces to deliver cohesive, intuitive solutions
- Conduct customer research using methods such as heuristic evaluation, usability testing, and other qualitative and quantitative techniques to uncover insights and validate design decisions
- Document and present research findings clearly to the wider team, ensuring insights are actionable and aligned with design goals
- Develop and analyse customer role profiles through regular research, building a deep understanding of user roles and consistently advocating for their needs throughout the design process
- Use the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework to shape ideas and guide user experience design for targeted segments
- Work within a Scrum Team, contributing to the build of your designs with standardised approaches, tools, processes, and deliverables that reflect best practice
- Help maintain the design systems and document new design components and patterns as needed
- Confidently lead and participate in workshops with internal and external stakeholders to collaboratively explore problems, enable group ideation, and drive rapid solutioning. You take ownership of design challenges and guide teams from problem definition to actionable design outcomes
Culture and Benefits
Datacom is one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest suppliers of Information Technology professional services. We have managed to maintain a dynamic, agile, small business feel that is often diluted in larger organisations of our size. It's our people that give Datacom its unique culture and energy that you can feel from the moment you meet with us.
We care about our people and provide a range of perks such as social events, chill-out spaces, remote working, flexi-hours and professional development courses to name a few. You’ll have the opportunity to learn, develop your career, connect and bring your true self to work. You will be recognised and valued for your contributions and be able to do your work in a collegial, flat-structured environment.
The Design Lead is based in Christchurch (Hybrid), and most of the team is in Auckland (Hybrid). We’re open to other locations for the right fit.
