Design Team Lead

Position Summary

The Design Lead is responsible for leading the Design team while fostering strong communication and collaboration across Design, Development, QA, Support/Deployment teams and product management stakeholders.
The role ensures that business requirements, functional specifications, UX designs, database architecture and supporting documentation are complete, clear, and ready for development. A key responsibility is building effective working relationships across teams, promoting open communication, ensuring a shared understanding of requirements and expectations, and encouraging constructive discussion of issues, risks, and competing priorities.
The Design Lead combines team leadership with hands-on design and business analysis, helping create an environment where information is shared openly, concerns are raised early, and teams work collaboratively toward common product and release objectives.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership

• Lead and coordinate the Design team, including assigning work based on priorities, expertise, and availability. Provide guidance and constructive feedback while maintaining high standards for quality and accountability.
• Communicate team progress, capacity constraints, risks, and blockers to management.

Communication and Collaboration

• Build strong working relationships across functional teams and product management stakeholders.
• Promote clear, timely communication and a shared understanding of requirements, priorities, technical constraints, and expectations.
• Facilitate constructive discussions, address misunderstandings, and encourage early identification of risks and dependencies.
• Ensure decisions and changes are communicated to affected teams.

SDLC and Release Planning

• Work closely with the Release Manager to coordinate Design team activities and ensure that release-related deliverables are completed within established timelines.
• Monitor Design deliverables against release timelines, proactively identify potential delays or resource constraints, and communicate risks to relevant stakeholders.
• Participate in release planning and scope reviews, identifying outstanding requirements, dependencies, and risks.
• Support effective handoffs across Design, Development, QA, Support, and Deployment.

Business Analysis and Functional Design

• Personally lead and undertake the development of business specifications, functional requirements, and detailed design documentation, ensuring requirements are clearly defined, documented, and ready for development.
• Oversee the team’s deliverables: development and completion of thorough business requirements, use cases, workflows, functional specifications, business rules, and acceptance criteria. Ensure requirements are complete, unambiguous, and aligned with business objectives before development begins.
• Ensure the Design team works closely with Development to define and complete technical specifications, clarify system behaviour, identify technical dependencies, and address implementation considerations.

• Facilitate collaboration with Development and QA to ensure requirements are clearly understood, technically feasible, and sufficiently detailed before development begins.

UX Design and Development Readiness

• Oversee UX designs, user workflows, mockups, and interface specifications.
• Ensure designs meet usability expectations and provide sufficient detail for development and testing.
• Work with Development and QA to clarify expected behaviour and resolve design-related issues.

• Identify opportunities to improve documentation, processes, and cross-team collaboration.

Qualifications and Competencies

• 7+ years demonstrated ability to lead a team of professionals in an IT environment, establish clear expectations, provide constructive feedback, and ensure commitments are met.
• 7+ years of practical experience in business analysis, functional design, UX, or a related software development role.
• Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills.
• Strong collaboration and relationship-building skills, including the ability to facilitate discussions and resolve differing perspectives constructively.
• Experience translating business needs into clear requirements, functional specifications, and acceptance criteria.
• Solid understanding of the SDLC, software development processes, and release management.
• Working knowledge of relational databases, data structures, and application integrations.
• Ability to understand technical constraints, identify dependencies, and work effectively with developers and technical specialists.
• Diploma in Business Analysis, Design, Computer Science, or a related field.
• Knowledge of asset integrity management, inspection, or risk-based inspection (RBI) processes in the petroleum or oil and gas industry is an asset.