Head of Product Design

Responsibilities

Own the quality bar

• Set a clear, consistent quality bar for the design team.
• Build review processes and critique rituals that establish a shared language for quality.
• Evolve the design system and QA practices as the team grows.
• Lower the product’s learning curve for new users without losing the power experienced builders value.

Drive design’s strategic influence

• Shape product strategy and bring design thinking into roadmap conversations.
• Help lead expansion toward a broader, less technical audience.
• Build strong partnerships with Product, Engineering, and leadership.

Build and grow the team

• Lead a team of approximately 14 designers, including Design Leads, Design Engineering, and UX Research.
• Shape team structure, career frameworks, and progression paths.
• Create a culture of high standards, honest feedback, and clear expectations.
• Own hiring and headcount planning.

Build research into decision-making

• Establish a pragmatic, continuous UX research practice.
• Incorporate customer insight, product data, and community feedback into product decisions.
• Connect research to activation, adoption, retention, and new-user onboarding.

Help the team work in new ways

• Champion practical AI adoption across prototyping, research synthesis, design QA, and workflow efficiency.
• Keep the team current with evolving AI product tools, patterns, and expectations.
• Model a thoughtful, adaptive, and curious working style.

Requirements

• Experience managing managers, coaching senior designers, and building design teams that improve craft and business outcomes.
• Experience leading design for complex or developer-facing products.
• Strong craft judgment and the ability to explain and uphold high-quality standards.
• Experience making design a co-equal partner in product strategy and decision-making.
• Structured problem-solving skills in ambiguous environments.
• Understanding of AI, automation, or adjacent tooling and the ability to create usable, trustworthy product experiences.
• Research literacy and experience integrating research into product development.
• Data-informed decision-making using product analytics, research, and customer evidence.
• Experience with organizational design, career paths, performance management, and difficult performance conversations.

Nice-to-haves

• Open-source, fair-code, community-led, or builder-driven product experience.
• Front-end or design engineering fluency, especially for design system adoption and implementation quality.
• Experience building remote-first design rituals, critique, QA, and collaboration practices.
• Experience with activation, onboarding, templates, time-to-value, or product-led growth surfaces.
• Exceptional Design Manager experience with readiness for a first Head-level role.

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary range: 125000–236400.
• Equity ownership.
• Europe: 30 vacation days plus local public holidays.
• US: 20 vacation days and 8 sick days.
• Visa sponsorship is available for Germany; candidates elsewhere need existing right to work.

Other Information

• The role is remote-first and may be hired across multiple European locations.
• English is the company language.