What are the responsibilities and job description for the Staff Industrial Designer position at Milwaukee Tool?
Job Description
Position Overview: As a Staff Industrial Designer at Milwaukee Tool, you will help shape innovative products that solve real user needs and push our design language forward. This is an exciting mid-level role for a highly curious, hands-on designer with 3 years of professional experience who thrives in fast-paced product development. You will explore form, function, aesthetics, and user interaction while transforming insights into compelling concepts and manufacturable solutions. Working with increasing autonomy and in close partnership with senior designers, engineering, marketing, and research teams, you will play a key role in bringing impactful, user-driven products to life. This position reports to the Lead Industrial Designer or ID Manager.
Key Responsibilities
Milwaukee Tool is an equal opportunity employer.
Position Overview: As a Staff Industrial Designer at Milwaukee Tool, you will help shape innovative products that solve real user needs and push our design language forward. This is an exciting mid-level role for a highly curious, hands-on designer with 3 years of professional experience who thrives in fast-paced product development. You will explore form, function, aesthetics, and user interaction while transforming insights into compelling concepts and manufacturable solutions. Working with increasing autonomy and in close partnership with senior designers, engineering, marketing, and research teams, you will play a key role in bringing impactful, user-driven products to life. This position reports to the Lead Industrial Designer or ID Manager.
Key Responsibilities
- Concept Generation: Explore ideas through ideation, competitive assessments, and identification of unmet user needs.
- Design Development: Create designs using paper and digital sketching, technical drawings, renderings, 2D illustrations, 3D CAD, and hand-built mock-ups and models. Consider manufacturing and cost parameters.
- Visual Storytelling: Communicate design intent through visual storytelling to gain acceptance from the project team.
- Innovation: Be very curious and seek to understand and inject innovation into all programs and tasks.
- Form Development: Demonstrate a strong understanding of form development and the ability to create designs without predecessors.
- Collaboration: Participate in brainstorming and concept generation events. Collaborate with cross-functional teams, primarily marketing and engineering, to deliver designs based on established criteria. Attend weekly meetings, teleconferences, and lead design reviews with process partners and design peers.
- Documentation: Create necessary documentation to convey design solutions to management or cross-functional partners through renderings, models, mechanical drawings, and written reports. Present designs for milestone approval to marketing and engineering leadership.
- Ergonomics and Usability: Evaluate and apply fundamentals of ergonomics and usability to product solutions.
- Research Participation: Participate in internal research downloads, review research reports, and engage in hands-on project activities. Regularly participate in observational job site visits to understand user requirements. Collaborate with Design Research and Product Management teams to analyze and shape observations into valuable insights.
- Construction, Materials & VBL Guidelines: Propose construction, mechanisms, color, materials, surface finish, and manufacturing processes in cooperation with other business functions involved in new product development. Ensure designs comply with Milwaukee visual brand language (VBL) guidelines.
- Manufacturing Integration: Partner closely with engineering and suppliers to ensure design intent is maintained through manufacturing. Develop solutions optimized for injection molding, assembly processes, and scalable production while balancing cost, quality, and performance.
- Trend Monitoring: Continually monitor design trends involving form, materials, technology, etc..
- Project Management: Work on several projects concurrently and respond quickly to accelerated changes in project directions.
- Minimum of 3 years of professional design experience.
- Strong understanding of form development and the ability to innovate.
- Proficiency in paper and digital sketching, technical drawings, renderings, 2D illustrations, 3D CAD, and model making.
- Excellent communication skills for presentations, visual storytelling, and working with global partners.
- Ability to work on multiple projects concurrently and adapt to changes quickly.
- Knowledge of ergonomics, usability, and manufacturing processes.
- Familiarity with Milwaukee visual brand language (VBL) guidelines is a plus.
Milwaukee Tool is an equal opportunity employer.