Product Designer

Design at Substack

Experienced designers know that commercial and economic realities shape the possibility spaces of product strategy. Substack does not have silver bullets for the problems of human nature, and we will not avoid the costs of creating scaled platforms. But we do have a different model, one in which we make money only when creatives of all kinds earn money from audiences who value them enough to consistently pay them.

If you’re interested in working on this model, we’d love to chat! Design at Substack is somewhat wild, and we’re looking for rigorous, robust, high-output designers who are comfortable with the vagaries and dynamism of startup life. We are not a “best practices” shop; we have very little fixed process; we work closely with executives and other functions and we’re not territorial or precious.

Responsibilities

• Rapidly build context about disparate product areas, community dynamics, and industry norms in any domains, from print media to podcasting to online social systems
• Identify high-leverage opportunities for your team and help make their pursuit practicable through rigorous path-conception, batch-sizing, staging, and go to market planning
• Design beautiful, usable, scalable interfaces and flows for a wide range of product zones (from profiles to CRM / analytics, publication aesthetics to moderation systems, email layouts to interactive content actions, and so much more)
• Think holistically about the second-order effects on Substack as a product system; balance user groups, weigh trade-offs, and pragmatically find solutions which achieve the best outcomes possible given various constraints
• Find ways to help creators and audiences build long-lasting, rewarding, and healthy relationships; empower audience members to become contributors and creators
• Help diversify the kinds of creators Substack supports, through novel media type support, alternative reader experiences, supporting outreach programs, and more
• Shape the culture and processes of Design at Substack

Requirements

• All product design applications must link to or include a portfolio
• 3 years of experience designing software; especially keen to see experience with social networks; content networks; or content systems or products of various kinds
• High degree of competence with Figma
• High tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity
• Interest in both independence and collaboration

Preferences

• Technical abilities: strong front-end skills, experience making and deploying sites, experience with TypeScript and React, SwiftUI capabilities
• Designers who’ve made use of LLMs to enhance their workflows (for example with variation, prototyping, etc.)
• SF Bay Area- or NYC-based (slightly preferred, but remote candidates welcome)