Lead, Product Design (Contract)

About Us

Powered by one of the largest global newsrooms in sports media, The Athletic brings sports fans the most comprehensive stories about the teams, sports and athletes they love. The Athletic’s newsroom of 450+ full-time staff delivers in-depth coverage of hundreds of professional and college teams across more than 47 North American markets and all 20 football clubs in the English Premier League, as well as many Championship clubs.

About the Role

The Athletic has changed the way sports fans follow their favorite teams and leagues. Our product team works at the intersection of our engineering, design, and data teams, as well as The Athletic’s Newsroom, the largest in sports media. Our Product Design team strives to craft sports experiences that blend technology with world class sports journalism. As Lead Product Designer on the Growth team, you will drive the creation of impactful consumer-facing features, experiences, and experiments across Web, iOS, and Android platforms that help bring our world-class sports coverage to new users and deepen all readers’ engagement with The Athletic. You will collaborate with researchers as well as other designers on our Growth team and help ensure consistency and continuity across all Growth focus areas. Your design leadership and user-centric perspective plays a critical part in the success of our entire Growth team.

This is a fixed term contract for leave coverage. The duration will be from 8/4/2025 to 9/26/2025.

This is 100% remote for candidates currently residing in the United States or Canada.

The hourly rate for this role will be $80.00 / Hour.

• Design world class experience for The Athletic’s users across our mobile apps and website.
• Collaborate with the product team to create wireframes, visuals, and prototypes that contribute to new and ongoing features.
• Work through product problems from definition and opportunity to shipping features to our subscribers.
• Collaborate with the extended Product Design team to work within, contribute to, and maintain our design system.
• Operate as a leader on the design team, contributing to product strategy and roadmap.
• Collaborate with user researchers to identify areas of focus, plan out research sessions, and incorporate user insights into product work.
• Present design solutions to cross-functional partners and company executives, defend design decisions, and incorporate feedback into the design cycle.
• Work across multiple cross-functional teams, partnering with Product Managers, Engineers, GMs, Analysts, and company executives on taking concepts from ideation to execution. 
• Deliver high fidelity mobile app and web designs to the engineering teams. Work with engineers to ensure the visual quality of what we release.
• Communicate the progress and outcome of your work to your teammates and peers.

• 7+ years of relevant product design experience at a fast-growing consumer company (subscription business is a big plus).
• Experience working on cross-functional teams.
• Experience developing great user experiences, and an ability to empathize with users.
• Experience supporting the design process by creating user flows, wireframes, UI designs, prototypes, and establishing/maintaining design systems.
• Experience leading and integrating user testing, research, and insights.
• Ability to manage your time across several workstreams.
• Excellent Figma and prototyping skills.
• Cross-discipline fluency. You know how to break down big challenges into smaller decisions framed as trade-offs (e.g. time vs. scope).
• Strong visual and typographic sensibility.
• Enthusiasm for The Athletic.
• Ability to think at a high level about product and feature strategy but also act with speed and precision to actualize projects.

The Athletic Media Company is an equal opportunity employer and enthusiastically encourages people from all backgrounds and experiences to apply. The Athletic will consider all applicants without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical and/or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, age, sexual orientation, military or veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law.

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