We are Forward Partners; the UK’s leading early-stage VC. We provide a game changing combination of capital and executional expertise to supercharge startups. Our unique approach is helping to build the UK’s next generation of applied AI, e-commerce and marketplace businesses.
Our portfolio consists of pre-seed and seed stage businesses. Our busy Product team supports our portfolio through the delivery of engineering, web development, design and growth expertise, collaborating with startup founders and their teams to ensure best practice advice and the highest possible quality of execution to enable our brilliant founders, their startups and their business plans.
Forward Partners is excited to be adding to our Product team; we are looking for a UX Lead who can collaborate with the Forward Partners team and our startup portfolio to deliver game-changing UX work.
About the role:
This is a brilliant opportunity for someone with an entrepreneurial mindset; we are looking for an experienced UX professional who is willing to hustle and is motivated to work quickly to solve problems and find solutions. The nature of working so closely with such early stage businesses creates a significant amount of unknowns – we are looking for someone who finds excitement working in fast-paced and changing environments and in defining processes and next steps.
- This role is hands-on and delivery-focused; we are looking for someone who is keen to contribute to a busy, fun, scrappy startup culture
- You will be wireframing and prototyping for Web, Tablet and Mobile
- You will be comfortable running customer interviews, gathering insights and running onsite or remote user testing sessions; this is the perfect role for someone who is as comfortable guerilla testing as working with agencies
- You will work closely with a number of startup founders, and will be required to explain the value of UX and present your craft and experiences effectively in spoken and written forms; in addition you will be able to influence and negotiate effectively.
- You will work with the Product Partner and Founders to guide overall product prioritisation
- Working with the product team to break down projects and produce time and effort estimates
- Keep oversight of the features in development and ensure that they are efficiently shipped on time across multiple projects
- Excellent ability to document and explain new requirements to the engineering team using well written user stories, wireframes, prototypes and acceptance tests
- Willingness to dig into data using tools like GA, Mixpanel and Amplitude to identify opportunities and monitor how new features are doing
About you:
- You will have strong UX experience and knowledge of what makes good UX.
- You will be able to perform heuristic UX evaluations and provide suggestions for improvements
- You will be extremely comfortable wireframing and prototyping product flows, screens and interactions in short timeframes.
- You need to be a fan of Lean UX and understand how startups build products. We work fast and then iterate based on feedback; no big upfront research projects
- Sketch is your ‘go-to’ tool as well as other modern prototyping tools to test ideas and interactions quickly
- You should have an understanding of what is easy and hard to produce in frontend technologies; if you have hands-on tech experience that is great – but not essential as long as you have this appreciation
- You will have really strong and varied user research and usability testing skills and experience
- You know how to use at least two of the following formats; personas, experience maps and jobs to be done, to synthesise customer insight
- You will also be interested in using other formats to develop your craft
- You must have an entrepreneurial mindset; our startups are in their first years of life so speed and quality are of the essence
- You enjoy working on and moving between different projects