Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Head of UX

🎯 Role Definition

The Head of UX is a senior design leader responsible for defining and delivering a unified user experience strategy across digital products and services. This role partners with Product, Engineering, Research, Marketing, and Business stakeholders to set UX vision, build and scale design systems, embed user research and data-driven decision-making, and grow a high-performing design organization. The ideal candidate blends product thinking, people leadership, and rigorous user-centered design practice to improve conversion, retention, accessibility, and overall customer satisfaction.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Product Designer with cross-functional product delivery experience
Director of UX / UX Design Lead responsible for multiple product lines
Head of Product Design or UX Research Lead in growth-stage companies

Advancement To:

VP of Design / VP of Product Experience
Chief Design Officer (CDO) or Chief Experience Officer (CXO)
Head of Product or Senior Product Leadership roles with design ownership

Lateral Moves:

Director of Product Management (product-focused career pivot)
Head of Research or Head of DesignOps
Director of Customer Experience / Service Design

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Define and communicate a clear, measurable UX strategy and roadmap that aligns with company goals, product strategy, and business KPIs (conversion, retention, NPS, engagement).
Lead the design organization end-to-end: hire, mentor, set goals, conduct performance reviews, and foster professional growth for product designers, UX researchers, content designers, and design ops specialists.
Build, evangelize, and govern a scalable design system and component library to ensure consistency, efficiency, and quality across web, mobile, and emerging platforms.
Partner closely with Product Management and Engineering to prioritize UX investments, scope features, and deliver high-impact product experiences on time and within budget.
Establish and operationalize user research and usability testing programs (qualitative and quantitative) to inform roadmaps, validate hypotheses, reduce risk, and accelerate product-market fit.
Drive a metrics-driven design practice: define UX KPIs, instrument analytics (funnel, behavioral, qualitative feedback), and run A/B and multivariate tests to improve outcomes.
Champion accessibility and inclusive design (WCAG compliance) by embedding accessibility criteria into workflows, QA, and release gates.
Create and maintain customer journey maps, service blueprints, and experience principles to guide product decisions and cross-functional priorities.
Lead cross-functional design sprints, workshops, and co-creation sessions to rapidly prototype concepts and align stakeholders on prioritized solutions.
Oversee high-fidelity prototyping, interaction design, and information architecture to reduce development rework and deliver usable, useful products.
Translate complex business requirements into clear UX deliverables—personas, storyboards, flows, wireframes, prototypes, and acceptance criteria.
Serve as the primary UX representative in executive and board-level discussions; clearly articulate design trade-offs, impact, and resourcing needs.
Design and manage hiring strategy, career ladders, compensation calibration, and team structure to scale design capacity sustainably.
Implement DesignOps best practices to improve process, tooling (Figma, Abstract, Storybook), handoff quality, and velocity across remote and distributed teams.
Establish vendor and agency relationships for specialized research, visual branding, or interaction work; manage scoping, budgets, and deliverables.
Ensure product experiences are consistent across platforms and touchpoints, including web, mobile, in-product, and marketing funnels.
Advocate for a customer-first culture across the company by creating forums for sharing research insights, journey analytics, and design learnings.
Reduce time-to-insight by building a UX research repository and standardizing research synthesis, reporting, and recommendation frameworks.
Set and track OKRs for the UX organization, tying design outcomes to revenue, retention, CSAT/NPS, and product adoption targets.
Build a proactive UX governance model including design reviews, pattern approvals, accessibility audits, and release readiness checks.
Mentor senior design leaders and create succession plans to ensure continuity and leadership bench strength.
Balance innovation and technical feasibility by partnering with engineering to evaluate constraints, technical debt, and opportunities for performance and reliability improvements.
Lead crisis or incident UX response (post-mortems, communication, quick UX fixes) to minimize customer impact and restore trust.

Secondary Functions

Support sales, marketing, and customer success with UX expertise for proposals, onboarding flows, and product demos that drive conversion.
Contribute to employer branding by representing the company at conferences, publishing case studies, and engaging with the design community to attract top talent.
Maintain an up-to-date competitive UX landscape analysis and synthesize trends to inform product differentiation and roadmap priorities.
Facilitate cross-team alignment on release schedules, beta programs, and customer pilots to ensure cohesive experience rollouts.
Drive continuous improvement initiatives for design quality, including design debt reduction plans and post-launch usability monitoring.
Collaborate with security and legal teams to ensure UX patterns comply with privacy, consent, and regulatory requirements.
Manage vendor relationships for usability labs, remote testing tools, and CX platforms; negotiate contracts and measure vendor performance.
Lead internal training programs on design thinking, research best practices, accessibility, and analytics literacy for non-design teams.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

UX Strategy & Vision: Experience developing and executing UX strategy and roadmaps tied to business metrics and growth objectives.
Design Systems: Proven experience building, scaling, and governing a cross-platform design system (tokens, components, pattern library).
User Research & Testing: Deep knowledge of formative and summative research methods, usability testing, remote moderation, and research operations.
Interaction & Visual Design: Strong command of interaction design principles, information architecture, typography, color systems, and UI patterns.
Prototyping & Tools: Expert-level use of Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, Axure, Framer, or similar high-fidelity prototyping tools and collaboration platforms.
Analytics & Experimentation: Proficiency with product analytics (Mixpanel, Amplitude, Google Analytics), A/B testing platforms (Optimizely, VWO), and interpreting metrics.
Accessibility & Compliance: Practical knowledge of WCAG guidelines, inclusive design practices, and accessibility testing tools.
Front-end Fundamentals: Comfortable discussing HTML/CSS/JS constraints and collaborate on performant, maintainable UI implementations.
Service Design & CX: Experience mapping end-to-end customer journeys, service blueprints, and aligning multi-touchpoint experiences.
DesignOps & Collaboration Tools: Familiarity with version control for design (Abstract, Figma libraries), Storybook, CI/CD integration for design components.
Mobile & Web UX Patterns: Deep understanding of platform conventions, responsive design strategies, and native vs. web tradeoffs.
Product Management Alignment: Ability to write clear acceptance criteria, prioritize backlogs, and lead trade-off conversations.

Soft Skills

Strategic Leadership: Ability to set long-term vision, make trade-offs, and mobilize teams toward measurable outcomes.
Stakeholder Management: Expert at influencing executives, product, and engineering through compelling storytelling and data-backed arguments.
Coaching & People Development: Strong track record of mentoring designers and building high-performing teams with clear growth paths.
Cross-functional Collaboration: Skilled at facilitating workshops, design reviews, and cross-team planning sessions to achieve alignment.
Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication for presenting complex UX concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
Empathy & User Advocacy: Deep empathy for users and ability to synthesize diverse feedback into clear product priorities.
Prioritization & Decision-making: Decisive in trade-off scenarios, balancing user needs, business goals, and technical constraints.
Adaptability: Comfort working in fast-changing environments and iterating based on new evidence or shifting strategy.
Influence without Authority: Ability to drive change in matrixed organizations through persuasion, data, and examples.
Conflict Resolution: Effective at navigating interpersonal or cross-team conflicts and restoring productive collaboration.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Interaction Design, Computer Science, Psychology, or related field.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree in HCI, Design, Human Factors, MBA, or equivalent advanced study in product or business strategy.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Interaction / Visual / Industrial Design
Cognitive Psychology or Behavioral Science
Computer Science, Engineering, or Information Systems
Service Design / UX Research / Design Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

8–15+ years in product design, UX, or related fields with progressive leadership responsibilities; typically 3–7 years managing managers or running a design function.

Preferred:

10+ years in product or digital design roles with at least 5 years in senior leadership (Head/Director level) responsible for strategy, team growth, and measurable business outcomes. Proven experience scaling teams from early-stage to enterprise, shipping cross-platform products, and building/designing design systems.

Additional expectations:

Portfolio demonstrating end-to-end product design leadership, measurable impact (KPIs improved), and examples of design system work.
Experience working in agile delivery models and partnering with product and engineering in fast-paced environments.
Demonstrated success with stakeholder influence at the executive level and history of delivering user-centered products that drive business results.