Manager – Product Design

CURRENT ROOT EMPLOYEES - Please apply using the career page in Workday. This career site is for external applicants only.

The Opportunity

The UX team at Root Insurance is a collaborative, high-impact group on a mission to redefine insurance by designing products and experiences our customers love. Root’s broader mission is to unbreak insurance through data and technology to improve the lives of our customers. We believe in that mission deeply—and we take it seriously.

Here are a few things we think you should know about this role and our team:

Culture

We’re a small, young team working together to build something great. A core part of our vision is to create a culture and workplace that’s unique—somewhere people actually enjoy showing up to. We aim to do this by hiring people who love their craft and are passionate about what they do. We also look for people who are kind, humble, and willing to be real with each other. If that sounds like your kind of place, we’d love to meet you!

How We View Product Design

We believe product designers should be part researcher, part psychologist, and part product manager. Great designers could make great PMs—but we just love our craft too much to make the switch. To us, that means taking high levels of co-ownership over product vision and strategy and feeling true accountability for building effective, robust product roadmaps—and helping ensure they’re delivered well.

What You Should Expect in This Role

This role will lead the Shopping and Distribution suite of products at Root Insurance, which currently includes the Direct-to-Consumer Insurance Shopping Experience, Independent Agent Experience, and Partnerships and Embedded Insurance. You will lead a team of three senior product designers, with plans to grow the team over the next 18 months. This space is a strategic priority for the company and operates in a fast-moving environment.

The primary responsibility of this role is to provide deep support for your designers—participating in key milestones such as workshops and design reviews to ensure our design process is systematic and results in high-quality designs and experiences. You’ll own the design roadmap for this domain and run sprint planning for your team in collaboration with UX Operations and Design leadership.

Notably, we expect you to work very closely with your counterparts in product, engineering, and analytics to create more cohesive product development teams and co-lead the product strategy, discovery, and delivery roadmaps. To succeed in this role, you should be comfortable being hands-on, occasionally picking up projects when needed, while also excelling as a coach and systems thinker.

Insurance isn’t an industry known for great design or beloved products—and we’re passionate about changing that. With that said, we don’t have it all figured out yet—quite the opposite. We’re actively building our teams and operating systems, and this role will be a key contributor and co-owner in building excellence into our process.

If any or all of this excites you, we’d love to meet you.

Other Notes

Root is a "work where it works best" company. While we have an HQ office in Columbus, OH, where we gather a few times per year, we support working from any U.S. location.
 

 💡 Please provide a PDF or web link to your portfolio. Applications without a portfolio will not be considered.

Salary Range: $120,560 - $150,700 (Bonus & LTI Eligible)

How You Will Make an Impact

• Create a culture and work environment that’s unique and where people love to work

• Build excellence into our systems and processes to protect our ability to do deep work and produce excellent design

• Co-own the product strategy and roadmap with your product, engineering, and analytics counterparts

• Provide focus and prioritization for your team so they can do impactful work without burning out

• Fiercely advocate for the customer in all you do

• Mentor and support designers, elevating the overall craft of the team

What You Will Need to Succeed

• 5–7+ years of product design experience with a proven track record of delivering high-quality, user-centered solutions

• 3+ years of experience in a management role on a UX team

• Strong facilitation skills

• Excellent written communication skills

• High integrity and a fierce advocate for your people

• Comfort with fast-moving environments and the ability to manage multiple priorities at once

• Willingness to roll up your sleeves and fill in the gaps when needed

• A process- and systems-oriented mindset

• A strong sense of accountability and ownership

• Passion for people and a commitment to their development and success

• Grit and heart

Preferred but Not Required

• Prior experience scaling UX teams

• Prior experience leading or managing a design or UX team in a fast-moving environment, such as a startup

• Training in UX or Market Research, or experience leading UX Research teams

Don’t meet every single requirement?

Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Root, Inc., we are dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway!

Join us

At Root, we judge people based on the merit of their work, not who they are. If you are passionate about what this role entails and solving real problems, we encourage you to apply. We want to learn about you and what you can add to our team.

Who we are

We’re harnessing the power of technology to revolutionize insurance. Using machine learning and mobile telematic platforms, we’ve built one of the most innovative FinTech companies in the world. And we’re just getting started.

What draws people to Root

Our success is in large part due to our unwavering standards in hiring. We recognize that our products are only as good as the people building and promoting them. We want individuals who find solutions by going through the cycle of ideation to implementation with curiosity, rigor, and an analytical lens. Ask anyone who works here and you’ll hear similar reasons for why they joined:

Autonomy—for assertive self-starters, the opportunities to contribute are limitless.

Impact—by challenging the way it’s always been done, we solve problems that have a big impact on our business.

Collaboration—we encourage rich discussion and civil debate at every turn.

People—we are inspired by the collection of crazy-smart people around us.