Senior Product Designer in Boston

Hi! I’m Chris, head of Product Design at Ashby. We’re looking for a versatile, intrinsically motivated designer who is excited to contribute to rethinking how modern software is designed. At Ashby, you’ll be part designer, part product manager, part consultant, and part design system manager (or some combination of the 4!). We do design differently here, and if that excites you, read on.

Our unique approach is working – we’re growing >100% year-over-year and have notable customers like Notion, Linear, Shopify, and Snowflake. Our growth and retention metrics are best-in-class among our peers: tens of millions in ARR, very low churn, and many years of runway. We’re backed by investors like Y Combinator, Elad Gil, Lachy Groom, and many more.

In my previous roles, product teams always consisted of a product manager, a designer, and ~4-5 engineers. This may sound familiar. The product manager briefs the designer who then designs. After designing, mocks are handed to the engineers. We take a more principled approach at Ashby. If you’ve been designing software enough, you’ll realize design is required in varying degrees on each project. Sometimes you’re asked to design yet another settings page, when a reusable component and documentation would suffice. Other times, you may effectively be the product manager and own a project from beginning to end. In these latter cases, it made sense that you provided project updates and managed resources rather than being pinged by a separate product manager.

This principled approach is now what we do here and has helped Ashby take down incumbents in multiple verticals. We don’t settle for the status quo—we actively resist reversion to the mean.

Currently, I report to Benji, the co-founder & CEO. Both Abhik and Benji care deeply about design; the belief is that design should be owned by the product team collectively, not solely by a group of full-time designers with job titles. The design department’s job at Ashby is not to make every single design decision but to equip our entire product team to make better decisions themselves, as well as edit decisions that PMs/Engineers choose to make, while tackling the biggest design challenges ourselves.

Separately, you may be excited by the near seed-stage-like culture with fuzzy lines between roles, autonomy, and an almost no-meeting culture. You’ll get product-market fit and scale of a growth-stage startup, along with the agency and no-nonsense, no-red-tape culture of a seed-stage startup.

Talent teams aspire to build a hiring process that identifies great candidates, moves them quickly through the interview process, and provides an excellent experience for the candidate. Recruiters perform thousands of daily tasks to coordinate and relay information between candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers. Teams struggle to keep up!

Ashby provides talent teams with intelligent software that offers insights into where they’re failing and automates or simplifies many tasks. We design products that are approachable to beginners but mastered and extended by power users; in many ways, spreadsheets set the bar here (and are what we often replace).

Your qualifications:

• 4+ years of product design experience in desktop SaaS.
• Able to think from first principles instead of simply applying the “standard” UX processes.
• Can break down complex user problems by asking questions that narrow down the solution space.
• Enough experience that your intuition can solve many usability problems without relying solely on data & metrics or user research.
• Curious & resourceful enough to come up with creative solutions and de-risk them appropriately.
• Strong skills in layout, navigation, IA, UI, and interaction design.
• Strong visual design skills and obsession with craft & details.
• As a bonus, you have experience at an early-stage startup or have spent time as a solo designer on a team.

You may want to apply if you’re excited about:

• Creating leverage and impact far beyond a typical product team structure.
• Working on all parts of a massive product surface area across many user types and jobs-to-be-done.
• Reinventing the design model for modern enterprise software—what matters is solving a customer’s problem; tools you use are up to you.
• Covering all parts of the design process with focus on design craft—occasional user research, heuristics, and improving IA, navigation, interactions, UI patterns, and more.
• Helping build our design system from (almost) the ground up.

Conversely, you may not want to apply if:

• You feel uncomfortable designing independently without much guidance from a PM or design management.
• You’re uncomfortable having your decisions and process challenged by engineering & product.
• You prefer an in-person role over remote (Ashby operates remotely).
• You dislike written documentation.
• You want a set structure and rhythm to your projects.
• You prefer a narrow job scope—interaction design only, design system only, etc.

On a weekly basis you will find yourself:

• Consulting for engineers who need help structuring layout, typography, flows, etc.
• Digging into problems by consulting GTM, talking to customers, asking for data requests, and more to present confident assumptions about proposals.
• Using Figma to draw out ideas and create visual artifacts for stakeholder alignment.
• Writing specification docs (specs) that detail design proposals for stakeholder alignment.
• Taking ownership of larger product features and thinking through Jobs-To-Be-Done, navigation, IA, layout, interaction, etc.
• Taking in customer feedback and using heuristics to build a usability backlog and propose projects for engineers.
• Consolidating and refining our design system to be functional, aesthetic, and best-in-class.

Interview Process

Our interview process is four rounds with some casual Zoom coffee in between to get to know each other:

• 30-minute introduction call to discuss Ashby and your experience
• 45-minute portfolio review
• 135-minute design exercise, portfolio deep dive, and meet the CEO. The exercise will be a live whiteboarding exercise with a prompt and you’ll show how you break down problems and solutions. The portfolio review is repeated with more time and a different audience.
• 90-minute meet the team + an app teardown

I’ll be your main point of contact and will prepare you for interviews. You’ll meet other engineers and product managers as well (with 15 minutes in each interview to ask questions). If we don’t give an offer, I’ll provide feedback if you’d like it.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• 10-year exercise window for stock options.
• Unlimited PTO with four weeks recommended per year.
• Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US.
• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget.
• $100/month education budget with manager approval for more expensive items.
• If you’re in the US, top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents with premiums covered by Ashby.

Ashby’s success hinges on hiring great people and creating an environment where we can be happy, challenged, and do our best work. We’re building that environment from the ground up and hope you’re excited to apply.

Ashby provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. We are committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce and welcome people from all backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and abilities.