Product Designer

About the role

The Modern Classrooms Project is a fast-growing 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that empowers educators to build classrooms that respond to every student's needs. Founded by two award-winning teachers, we lead a movement of educators in implementing a self-paced, mastery-based instructional model that leverages technology to foster human connection, authentic learning, and social-emotional growth. To date, our free online course and Virtual Mentorship Program have empowered almost 100,000 educators in 150+ countries. We’ve partnered with schools and districts nationwide to train and support both teachers and administrators, and researchers from Johns Hopkins University found “overwhelming positive support” for our approach.

Responsibilities

• Refine the end-to-end user experience.
  • Map teacher, student, and administrator journeys; define information architecture; and design intuitive paths that hold up as the products grow.
  • Keep a clear-eyed view of where users get confused, rushed, or stuck, and design those moments away.
  • Wireframe and prototype before we build. Produce quick wireframes so scope and behavior get debated cheaply in a sketch rather than expensively in shipped code, then build and validate high-fidelity, clickable prototypes for high-stakes flows.
• Build and own the design system.
  • Create and maintain a documented component library grounded in MCP’s brand and extended for product needs, so engineers can compose from consistent parts instead of reinventing patterns.
• Bring our product design efforts in-house.
  • We’ve worked effectively with external design partners, but we don’t yet have a mature design operation. You’ll help us establish design best practices so that everything we build meets our teachers and their students’ needs.

Requirements

• Do the work yourself. You can take a flow from wireframe to high-fidelity to clickable prototype, and you’ve put your designs in front of real users to watch them struggle and succeed.
• Ship pixels, not just opinions about them. You understand information architecture and design systems. You build components that scale using auto-layout, variables, variants, and high-fidelity clickable prototypes that other designers can easily consume, and you keep a product from becoming a maze of nested menus as features pile up.
• Test assumptions. You’ve run usability tests and know that watching five people use something teaches you more than guessing with certainty. You’re curious about behavior, not defensive about your designs.
• Write, too. You treat the words in the interface as part of the design. You can make a button label, an error message, or a piece of feedback to a struggling 10-year-old clearer and kinder without being told to.
• Sweat the research - and the real-world constraints. Accessibility, color contrast, touch-target sizes, school-issued devices, and shaky classroom wifi are design inputs to you, not afterthoughts. You can design web apps and learning experiences that are grounded in cognitive science learning principles.
• Want to shape the world. You're motivated to be part of something larger than yourself, and you believe the highest use of your craft is empowering others.

Qualifications

• You have edtech experience, ideally K-12: school-issued devices, district IT restrictions, limited training time, the rhythm of a school day, and the gap between what works in a demo and what works in a real classroom.
• You have light front-end skills, enough HTML/CSS/JS literacy to inspect a build, tweak a value, and make handoff frictionless (bonus if you can prototype in code).
• You’ve designed for young children and across wide age ranges, where reading level, motor skills, and attention vary enormously.

Skills

• Educational technology experience
• Experience working with K-12 educators and students
• Strong understanding of user-centered design principles
• Experience with design systems and component libraries
• Ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams
• Strong visual design skills
• Experience with user testing and usability research

Benefits

• Employer-sponsored health insurance through CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield
• Employer-sponsored dental and vision insurance and ancillary benefits through MetLife
• Participation in Vanguard 403(b) deferred-compensation plan with 3% employer match
• Paid Time Off, inclusive of: vacation/PTO (20 days), paid holidays, paid parental leave, sick and safe paid time off, "Me Days", and the ability to earn paid Comp time off
• Annual budget for MCP-funded Continuous Learning for the program(s) you request (available after 6 months of continuous full-time employment)
• FSA and Dependent Care FSA access
• 1x Salary Life Insurance company-paid coverage
• Access to Wishbone Pet Insurance Benefit
• Ability to work remotely and to set your own hours (within reason)

Pay

$130,000 - $160,000 per year, plus benefits

Schedule

Full-Time, Remote, USA-based