Creative Manager of Product

at  Learning Without Tears

About Learning Without Tears (LWT): We are an ever-growing, family-owned company striving to provide the best education products, professional learning, and digital resources for educators and children. Innovation and collaboration fuel us every day. We live our passion of helping children learn and grow.
Join our mission-driven, dynamic team as we embrace change, excellence, creativity, and simplicity to make a difference in educators’ and children’s lives. LWT believes in diversity, equity & inclusion, and strives to create a culture of community & belonging. Our employees bring a variety of experiences and perspectives that fuel our passion and innovation and drive our mission.
The Creative Manager, Product is responsible for leading and managing cohesive and successful design and pre-print production of a range of products for educators and students, across print and digital experiences, that encapsulate Learning Without Tears’ (LWT) unique approaches and strategies and meets or exceeds the expectations for the overall look, feel, and quality of our products and brands.

YOUR EXPERIENCE & QUALIFICATIONS:

• B.A. or B.S. in Graphic, Visual, or Product Design, or equivalent work experience.
• 6+ years related experience
• Expertise in designing for K-5 educational publishing, both print and digital
• Demonstrated ability for art direction, developing strong creative concepts and solutions
• Expertise with Adobe Creative Cloud (InDesign, InCopy, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat Pro), Figma, as well as experience with project management software such as Jira, smartsheets, Excel.
• Understanding of accessibility standards as well as product specifications and requirements for school use
• Strong organizational skills with the ability to manage multiple projects at once while both facilitating delivering consistent, high-quality work on a timely basis
• Product concepting/ideation experience
• Excellent creative skills with impeccable attention to detail
• Ability to partner and collaborate across teams, as well as work independently
• Experience developing design systems and style guides
• Knowledge of all stages of design from concept to production required
• Ability to coach employees to enhance their skills and performance
• Experience supervising creative staff, freelancers, and vendors
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Experience creating print products with conversion for HTML and XML as well as digital experiences

• Understand the design expectations of the education industry along with LWT’s unique visual and curricular objectives, providing expertise and direction in developing designs for products that are in alignment with LWT’s brand.
• Lead and participate in discoveries, brainstorming, creation of requirements, and discussion of concepts, development of prototypes and creative solutions for product development related to look, feel, experience, and a cohesive brand experience.
• Manage and develop design of workbooks, guides, digital experiences and assets in collaboration with in-house teams including creative, curriculum, product, and technology teams as well as stakeholders, and contractors/vendors.
• Provide art direction to manage the integrity of LWT’s identity and brand, working closely with the Creative Director to ensure and support a recognizable ecosystem of high-quality products and experiences.
• Manage the production of accurate and error-free concepts, design rounds, mocks and final art files for print or development.
• Hire, train, motivate, evaluate, and manage staff to ensure employees receive adequate guidance and resources to accomplish established objectives, ensure the highest quality of work from the entire team, including clear documentation and communication of requirements, quality needs, and brand expectations.
• Maintain knowledge about projects the team is working on; coordinate and build synergies and collaboration where appropriate; facilitate integration and sharing of staff knowledge and efforts with others.
• Develop, implement, and monitor group standards, guidelines, and objectives, and participate in and maintain group planning and budget to maintain staffing to ensure proper planning and efficient operation of the group.
• Stay abreast of new software packages and applications as they become available to the design community and recommend as appropriate for the LWT design environment. Learn updated versions of software as they become published and available to LWT.