Digital Design Director

Our purpose is to shine a light on climate-related risks and opportunities and advance strategies to thrive. To do so, we're building a world-class team to innovate and implement transformative climate strategies.

In January 2020, climate change visionary and entrepreneur Laura Zizzo and successful technology entrepreneur Jeremy Greven joined forces. Together, they launched Manifest with a vision to create the world's most intelligent climate change for business platform. As a result, Manifest Climate was created, a software platform to help companies navigate climate change risks and opportunities. Featuring AI, advanced analytics, climate science, industry best practices, and much more, the platform allows companies to be more Climate Confident™. It provides a clear and straightforward way to understand, assess, govern, and disclose climate-related risks and creates greater transparency for stakeholders. 

At Manifest, we work with forward-thinking organizations across a broad range of industries, including finance, government, real estate, and more. Our role is to engage and empower businesses to develop climate and resilience strategies, educate teams on climate developments, equip them with the tools to identify and manage risks and opportunities and provide leading solutions.

We have an immense opportunity to scale our expertise to a global market that requires fast, smart support. We're building a world-class team to inform and inspire substantive, positive climate action. If you are a forward-thinker interested in purpose-driven work that helps real-world decision-makers and influencers respond to the climate crisis, we think you'd like it here.

Who we need

We are looking for an experienced leader of design, strategy, and digital projects; someone to step into the first Digital Design Director role. This is an opportunity to step into a scaling startup with a global enterprise client base, and spearhead the way we think about and approach design, branding, and visual storytelling. You are passionate about creating, aligning and delivering an intuitive and engaging visual experience across our platform, products, marketing, and messaging.

We're looking for someone with a strong entrepreneurial instinct who can leverage existing resources and capabilities in new and unique ways to achieve success; someone who is not afraid to take the initiative on a project. In a fast-moving environment, we need people who have a deep desire to radically own their impact and embrace the freedom and responsibility of it.

Who you are 

You want a deeper purpose and place to apply your commitment to sustainability with your calling to create beautiful, engaging designs. You have played a critical role introducing an organization-wide priority on design and brand alignment. You think creatively about design solutions and strategy and encourage others to do the same. You want to stay hands-on, continuing to expand your skills in modern, cutting-edge and engaging design from product conception to product delivery. A driven leader, you want to take charge of an organization-wide evolution that prioritizes design - you want a seat at the table at an organization where the table continuously expands to include every voice. You know how to achieve results across three fundamental areas - creating and executing a design strategy; collaborating across internal / external teams and with third party vendors, and balancing business demands with customer needs.

What's in it for you

Challenges, impact, and inspiration. You want to channel your passion for climate consciousness into your daily work. You want the professional reward of working on the most important issues facing the world today with a diverse team of brilliant yet humble, funny yet incredibly professional collaborators. This is a genuine opportunity to work on climate issues, and to be a thought leader impacting how a wide range of clients think about and act on climate change. You want to be part of a company responding to a massive market opportunity ahead of a huge adoption curve, where soon thousands of public companies will have to disclose climate-related risks and opportunities.

How you will make a difference: 

• Design strategy management. You will build, manage and oversee the execution of a design practice to enhance and maintain a modern, engaging and consistent look and feel across our products and messaging.
• User interface and experience design. You will be hands-on and lead the UI design. You will work closely with internal and external stakeholders, gathering and interpreting feedback, weighing experience against usability principles and proactively resolving design issues prior to development. You will confirm product development has adopted your design strategy and ensure consistency. 
• Autonomy. You will embrace and excel in an agile, self-managing environment that encourages everyone to act with a sense of radical responsibility. Manifest operates at the leading edge of both climate change intelligence and leadership paradigms, which offers the thrill of innovation and the challenge of ambiguity. You will thrive as we grow and evolve together. Being part of Manifest allows you to bring your full self to work.

What you bring to our collaborative (virtual) space:

• The design experience. You have expertise making evidence-based and customer-centric design decisions. You are comfortable with primary customer research, whether it be usability testing, discussion groups, quantitative or qualitative methods, because you understand that the design process is iterative and requires direct feedback from users. You can confidently drive the creative process. You have a portfolio demonstrating your hands-on experience working on all design aspects of a brand, from website to sales enablement to marketing collaterals to software UI design in an agile software development environment. A related degree would definitely be a bonus. You have a broad understanding of a range of tools and technologies and you want to continue to stay hands-on.
• The communication skills. You have an outstanding ability to relay information visually, verbally or in writing. You can speak to any level of internal or external client. You are comfortable making formal and informal presentations that bring together strategy and high level concepts. Your written work from process documentation to project communications is impressive. Your project updates - written and oral - are clear and concise.
• The dedication. You are purpose-driven with a desire to change the global trajectory when it comes to climate and deeply committed to our mission. You are genuinely excited to apply your talents in building our brand and expanding the list of clients we serve. New ideas and new technology interest you. The willingness to persevere despite obstacles, the confidence to try and fail, and the humility to learn, grow and adapt describe you. 
• The collaborative approach. You have the high degree of emotional intelligence and curiosity necessary to thrive in our self-managing environment. You embrace diverse perspectives and excel at building relationships. You are happy to jump in wherever and whenever needed.

Evolve, improve, and thrive with us

Our purpose drives everything: shine a light on climate-related risks and opportunities and advance strategies to thrive. Our unified belief in this purpose drives our culture, the calibre of talent we attract, our work ethic, resolve, and determination.

Our values include a relentless focus on customers, making things simple and useful, and creating thriving ecosystems. We have other values too, but they're table stakes: transparency, integrity, authenticity, fairness, wholeness, open, honest communication, agility, balance, self-management, and autonomy. In short, we want to build an amazing place to work where every team member is empowered, supported, and energized.

We expect to make some mistakes along our journey, but that's all part of finding our way. We're here to learn and grow together - to build a fantastic company that makes a difference, and hopefully, has a legacy that lasts forever.

We are always on the lookout for committed and passionate climate-change professionals interested in contributing their talents in a challenging, energetic, and inter-disciplinary environment. If you feel you meet 70% of the qualifications we are looking for and are determined to make a difference, we encourage you to apply. We promise to consider your application fully. 

We strive to build a team that reflects the diversity of the communities where we live and work. We encourage applications from traditionally underrepresented groups such as women, visible minorities, Indigenous peoples, people identifying as LGBTQ2SI, veterans, and people with disabilities. If we can make this easier through accommodation in the recruitment process, please let us know.