Sr. Product Designer

Apologies if you recently applied to this role and haven't heard back, an issue with LinkedIn removed our ability to see applicants. Please apply again if you applied to this this week ABOUT FOSTR Fostr Talent is a boutique Canadian staffing firm placing global professionals into long-term, embedded roles with North American companies. We handle the contract, payments, and support — you work directly with the client’s team, including the Fostr contractors already at Acuity. ABOUT THE CLIENT The client is a Canadian higher-ed technology company. Its assessments help medical, health sciences, and other professional programs evaluate applicants beyond grades — measuring skills like ethics, empathy, and collaboration. You’d be working on high-stakes, trust-sensitive products alongside their product, engineering, and research teams. ENGAGEMENT DETAILS
• Term: 6 months, with possibility of extension
• Rate: $22 USD per hour
• Schedule: Monday–Friday, 9:00 AM–5:00 PM EST
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Location:
Fully remote
• Type: Contract engagement through Fostr

ABOUT THE ROLE
We are looking for a contract Product Designer with a service design background to support the modernization of a mature, complex software product and the client input work that runs alongside it. This is a deliberately senior brief. The product has deep interdependencies — a single change in one workflow can affect twenty others downstream — so we need someone who thinks in systems and end-to-end service journeys, not screens. The work is research-heavy and discovery-led, and the person in this seat will have unusual visibility into the product and direct access to the people who use it. Most importantly, this is a partnership role, not a design-task role. We are not looking for someone to execute a backlog. We need a designer who will form a point of view, champion their feedback, and push back when the evidence says the team is solving the wrong problem. PRIORITY TRACKS
• Modernization: Modernizing a mature product — untangling legacy workflows, reducing accumulated complexity, and designing a coherent future state that can be delivered incrementally.
• Client input: Gathering, synthesizing, and acting on customer and internal feedback — turning what clients tell us into prioritized, evidence-backed design direction. SCOPE OF WORK & KEY DELIVERABLES 1. Service Design & Journey Mapping Map the end-to-end service across every role that touches it — not just the interface, but the handoffs, the manual workarounds, the support interventions, and the operational steps that happen outside the product.
• Current-state service blueprints and journey maps
• Identification of friction, duplication, and failure points across the full service
• Future-state service design with a staged path to get there 2. Modernization of Complex Software Support the redesign of a mature product where functionality has accumulated over time. Understand the dependencies well enough to know what a change actually costs, and sequence improvements so the product keeps working while it improves.
• Dependency and impact analysis for proposed changes
• Updated information architecture and user flows
• Wireframes and clickable prototypes for agreed workflows
• Edge cases, states, permissions, and Engineering handoff notes 3. UX Research & Discovery Lead discovery rather than support it. Define what we need to learn, choose the right method, run the research, and turn findings into framed opportunities the team can act on.
• Research plans, interview guides, and usability test scripts
• Synthesis of qualitative and quantitative findings
• Opportunity framing: user value, business value, risks, and assumptions
• Clear recommendations with a stated point of view 4. Client Input & Feedback Loops Work with the client-facing teams to turn customer feedback into design direction — separating the loudest request from the most important problem.
• Synthesis of customer, support, and internal feedback
• Prioritized themes with evidence behind them
• Design responses to the highest-impact themes 5. AI in the Design Process Claude is embedded in a growing number of Acuity’s internal processes, and it sits alongside Figma in the prototyping workflow rather than beside it. We expect the designer in this seat to work the same way and to help raise the team’s practice. The Product Manager on this team is deep on AI and will be an active collaborator, not a bystander.
• Prototyping and concept exploration using Claude together with Figma
• AI-assisted research synthesis, workflow mapping, and option generation
• Judgment about where AI output needs human verification before it reaches Engineering REQUIRED SKILLS & EXPERIENCE Service Design
• Demonstrated service design experience — blueprints, journey maps, and end-to-end thinking across multiple roles and touchpoints
• Comfort designing the parts of a service that happen outside the interface: handoffs, manual steps, and support processes Modernization of Complex Systems
• Experience redesigning mature, legacy, or heavily interdependent software
• Ability to trace how one change ripples through a system and to sequence work accordingly
• Experience with multi-role, permission-based products: admin tools, internal operations tools, reporting and analytics, assessment or credentialing platforms, or regulated and trust-sensitive products UX Research & Discovery Leadership
• Able to run discovery independently, from framing the question through to a recommendation
• Fluent in both qualitative and quantitative methods, and clear about when each one applies
• Comfortable working before requirements exist, and able to stop a team from jumping to solution mode Partnership & Advocacy
• Willing to form and defend a point of view, and to disagree with Product or Engineering when the evidence supports it
• Assertive in advocating for users while staying collaborative — someone who contributes to what gets built, not only how it looks
• Proactive communication, early risk flagging, and strong judgment about when to escalate
• Accessibility standards Prototyping & Validation
• Moves quickly from low-fidelity concepts to clickable prototypes, using Figma and Claude together
• Uses prototypes to align stakeholders and support usability testing
• Knows when a rough concept is enough and when high fidelity is required Claude & AI Proficiency
• Hands-on experience with Claude as a working tool, not a trial — prototyping, research synthesis, workflow mapping, competitive exploration, drafting interview guides, summarizing feedback, generating design options, and documenting handoff notes
• Able to explain what they have actually shipped with Claude or comparable AI tools, and where they chose not to use it
• Willing to adopt AI-supported internal processes and contribute to improving them TOOLS & SOFTWARE
• Design & prototyping: Figma and Claude, used together. Claude is a primary tool here, not a supplement — it sits alongside Figma in prototyping, and an increasing number of Acuity’s internal processes run on it.
• Whiteboarding & collaboration: Basic knowledge of whiteboarding and collaboration tools such as FigJam, Miro, or others
• Graphics (asset): Experience in Adobe Creative Suite or Affinity may be seen as an asset
• Project management: Jira, Asana, or Trello
• Productivity: Google Workspace (Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides)
• Research & analytics: User research and analytics tools such as Maze and Hotjar NICE-TO-HAVE EXPERIENCE
• Formal service design training or practice
• Designing applicant, evaluator, rater, or administrator workflows
• Operating in a regulated, compliance-heavy, or high-stakes domain
• Working in a company moving from ad hoc design support to embedded product pods WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
• Build an accurate picture of a complex service faster than the team expects
• Identify the highest-risk usability and service failures, with evidence
• Produce design options that account for downstream impact rather than optimizing one screen
• Validate direction with real users, customers, or internal teams
• Deliver handoff packages that reduce ambiguity for Engineering
• Change the team’s mind at least once, with a well-argued case THIS ROLE IS NOT A FIT FOR
• Visual, brand, or marketing designers, or Figma production-only resources
• Someone who waits for fully defined tickets or needs deep domain documentation before contributing
• Someone who defers automatically to Product or Engineering rather than contributing a point of view
• Someone uncomfortable with ambiguity or unable to collaborate directly with Engineers OUT OF SCOPE The contractor will not own product strategy or roadmap prioritization, provide design support across all products, manage the design team, rebuild the full design system, or own Engineering delivery or technical architecture.