Principal UX Designer

Palo Alto, CA, United States

At SAP, we enable you to bring out your best. Our company culture is focused on collaboration and a shared passion to help the world run better. How? We focus every day on building the foundation for tomorrow and creating a workplace that embraces differences, values flexibility, and is aligned to our purpose-driven and future-focused work. We offer a highly collaborative, caring team environment with a strong focus on learning and development, recognition for your individual contributions, and a variety of benefit options for you to choose from.

What you’ll do:

As a key leader within the SAP Design community, you’ll influence all of SAP’s internal and customer-facing product offerings. You will collaborate closely with research, design, development, product management, marketing, and executives, significantly impacting SAP’s design and development teams.

This role requires a blend of visionary design, thought leadership, and practical, hands-on and collaborative involvement in end-to-end product design and experience strategy. You will play a critical role in supporting teams by offering guidance through detailed experience assessments which will help identify opportunities to enhance and elevate usability, ensuring a seamless and intuitive user experience across all products. Your influence will ensure that every aspect of the user journey is thoughtfully designed, providing a cohesive and satisfying experience for all users.

What you bring:

You possess a diverse skill set that encompasses visionary design thinking, strong leadership, and extensive expertise in design for product suites and or platforms in addition to overall experience strategy. You are adept at applying user-centered design principles to create innovative experience concepts and solutions that drive differentiation across product offerings.

Critical to success is the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and influence organizational leaders and executives to embrace progressive design methodologies. Experience conducting thorough experience assessments to identify and address usability challenges is essential, as is the capacity to provide actionable guidance for enhancing user experience to elevate quality and overall user satisfaction.

Expectations and tasks

Foster design excellence and drive cultural transformation and innovation

Develop best practices, rituals, and a strong design culture within our organization

Formulate strategic plans to align design with user needs, both long-term and short-term

Ensure consistency and coherence across experiences in alignment with the SAP design system and brand, utilizing a user-centric approach

Balance short-term needs with long-term vision to meet continuous release cycles and future goals

Exhibit expertise in innovation strategy, design thinking, integrated platform experiences, design methodologies, and lifecycle planning

Build strong relationships with design, development, sales, go-to-market, consulting, and product owners across SAP units to deliver competitive, best-in-class design solutions leveraging the full SAP portfolio

Promote cross-functional alignment and collaboration

Collaborate with design leadership across Lines of Business to amplify design impact

Prioritize tasks in coordination with design leaders, engineering, and product management

Assist in developing organizational and functional structures to scale design

Monitor and analyze quality metrics to assess design impact and identify improvement opportunities

Participate in design critiques, offering feedback to enhance the quality and strategy of the work

Focus on talent growth and development within the design team

Education and qualifications

Minimum of 10 years experience in design systems, product design, design leadership and innovation, agile product delivery experience across enterprise and consumer markets

Experience in designing and delivery of solutions for enterprise software, such as the ERP domain

Extensive familiarity in designing for data related products, platform features and common functionalities

Strong communication skills, mastery of negotiation skills, experienced in presenting to executive leadership and customers, evangelizing the product vision, and supporting sales cycles

Proven track record in envisaging, enacting, and managing UX conceptual projects

Hands-on experience with managing all aspects of design activities within projects

Excellent knowledge of customer needs and market trends

Significant experience presenting to, and working with, customers at C-level

Working knowledge of design tools and technologies

Proven ability to influence and coordinate cross-functional teams in a matrix organization to execute a plan. Team player, fostering a collaborative work environment with peers, with a clear view on delivering results.

About the Team

The Design Excellence team stands at the forefront of enhancing user experiences throughout the SAP product ecosystem. Committed to innovation and elevating UX standards, our team is driven to improve usability and set new standards to drive measurable impacts. Joining us means diving into the heart of design, where you'll collaborate with designers and design leaders across various solution domains. Together, we look to craft experiences that transform the very essence of user interactions within our offerings.

Bring out your best

SAP innovations help more than four hundred thousand customers worldwide work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively. Originally known for leadership in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, SAP has evolved to become a market leader in end-to-end business application software and related services for database, analytics, intelligent technologies, and experience management. As a cloud company with two hundred million users and more than one hundred thousand employees worldwide, we are purpose-driven and future-focused, with a highly collaborative team ethic and commitment to personal development. Whether connecting global industries, people, or platforms, we help ensure every challenge gets the solution it deserves. At SAP, you can bring out your best.

We win with inclusion

SAP’s culture of inclusion, focus on health and well-being, and flexible working models help ensure that everyone – regardless of background – feels included and can run at their best. At SAP, we believe we are made stronger by the unique capabilities and qualities that each person brings to our company, and we invest in our employees to inspire confidence and help everyone realize their full potential. We ultimately believe in unleashing all talent and creating a better and more equitable world.

SAP is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to the values of Equal Employment Opportunity and provide accessibility accommodations to applicants with physical and/or mental disabilities. If you are interested in applying for employment with SAP and are in need of accommodation or special assistance to navigate our website or to complete your application, please send an e-mail with your request to Recruiting Operations Team: [email protected].

For SAP employees: Only permanent roles are eligible for the SAP Employee Referral Program, according to the eligibility rules set in the SAP Referral Policy. Specific conditions may apply for roles in Vocational Training.

EOE AA M/F/Vet/Disability

Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to their age, race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, age, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, et al), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, protected veteran status, or disability.

Compensation Range Transparency : SAP believes the value of pay transparency contributes towards an honest and supportive culture and is a significant step toward demonstrating SAP’s commitment to pay equity. SAP provides the annualized compensation range inclusive of base salary and variable incentive target for the career level applicable to the posted role. The targeted combined range for this position is 1851000 - 403000(USD) USD. The actual amount to be offered to the successful candidate will be within that range, dependent upon the key aspects of each case which may include education, skills, experience, scope of the role, location, etc. as determined through the selection process. Any SAP variable incentive includes a targeted dollar amount and any actual payout amount is dependent on company and personal performance. Please reference this link for a summary of SAP benefits and eligibility requirements: SAP North America Benefits .

Requisition ID: 395834 | Work Area:Software-User Experience | Expected Travel: 0 - 10% | Career Status: Professional | Employment Type: Regular Full Time | Additional Locations: #LI-Hybrid

Nearest Major Market: San Jose

Nearest Secondary Market: Palo Alto

Job Segment: User Experience, ERP, Cloud, R&D Engineer, SAP, Technology, Engineering

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