director archives

Job Opening: Director, User Experience

I recently decided to step down as the Director of User Experience in the IT department of the Church. While I thoroughly enjoyed my work as a Director (best job of my life to date), I found myself longing to get more hands on in product design and development. I’ve now started as a Product Manager assigned to the Priesthood department where I’m working on new ideas for how the Church uses the Internet.

So, we have a new job opening. We need a new Director for our User Experience group. You can read the official job description for the full details, but let me give you my quick “unofficial” job description and a thought.

This job rocks! It has great management support. Joel Dehlin, our CIO, is our biggest fan and supporter. It’s a very challenging job. You have to be a great leader to a team of very talented and competent professionals. It’s a job that has a multitude of different kinds of end-users. Our end-users include Church employees, General Authorities, missionaries, Church leaders, Church members, and people who do not belong to our faith. Many of our solutions have to be global and work in a variety of languages and cultures. This job requires you to be a leader in the IT department. You need to work effectively with the CIO and the other Directors to accomplish department-level objectives and goals. Finally, and possibly the most challenging, you need to figure out what a user experience group should be and do at the Church. I’ve learned that you can’t just copy and paste what you’ve learned in previous jobs into the Church. Practices and approaches that have worked in other organizations, don’t always work or apply here. You have to discover the Lord’s Way to do your work. Working in that position the past two years has been a fun, wonderful, challenging and growing experience for me as I’m sure it will be for my replacement.

The person we need may come from a very unexpected place or they might come from our current team. I don’t know, but I am confident the Lord will help us place the right person in this position. Let me make a sincere request. If you are feeling a prompting regarding this position, either to suggest it to someone else or to consider it yourself, please act on that prompting. There are plenty of great places to work in the world doing meaningful, important work. If the Lord wants you where you are, we want you there, please stay there and have the impact He intends. The Lord needs good people doing good things everywhere. However, consider that the Church is also a great place to work where you can do meaningful, important work. If the Lord wants you here, we want you here. In this matter, like many others, you and others will be blessed if you seek to know the Lord’s will and then follow it. Again, if you’re feeling a prompting, I simply ask that you act on it. I suggest you also take a good hard look at the full job requirements as well. Thanks!

posted by tadd on Tuesday, Mar 25, 2008