PRODUCT DESIGN SENIOR SPECIALIST

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. In my previous roles, product teams always consisted of a product manager, a designer, and ~4-5 engineers. The product manager briefs the designer who then designs. If you've been designing software enough, you'll realize in actuality, design is required in varying degrees on each project. Sometimes in the past, I'd be asked to design yet another settings page, when really all that was needed was an engineer to reuse existing components and just follow some documentation I had written. Other times, I felt I should effectively be the product manager and own a project from beginning to end. In these latter cases, it made sense that I was even the one providing project updates and managing resources rather than constantly being pinged by a separate product manager.
Both Abhik and Benji (our founders) care deeply about design, which at first glance may seem counterintuitive given the number of full-time designers that we employ. The belief is not that design is unimportant, but rather that it should be owned by the product team collectively, not solely by a group of full-time designers who happen to have the job title.
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. That, while tackling the biggest design challenges ourselves.
Separate from design, you may also be excited by the fact that we maintain a near seed-stage-like culture with fuzzy lines between functional roles, as much autonomy as you can handle, and a focus on IC-work with an almost-no-meeting culture. While you get the product-market fit and scale of a growth-stage startup, you also get the agency and no-nonsense, no-red-tape culture of a seed-stage startup.
What We’re Building
Scheduling a final round is an excellent example of our customers' challenges. Ashby provides talent teams with intelligent and powerful software that provides insights into where they’re failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they’re underwater with. 4+ years of product design experience in desktop SaaS.

• Able to think from first principles instead of simply applying the “standard” UX processes.
• Enough experience that your intuition can solve many usability problems without having to rely solely on data & metrics or conducting 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.

Helping reinvent the design model for modern enterprise software—you don’t have to build wireframes, user journeys, personas, etc. What matters is solving a customer’s problem; Covering all parts of the design process with a focus on design craft. Helping build our design system from (almost) the ground up.
You feel uncomfortable designing independently without much guidance from a PM or design management.
You prefer an in-person role over remote (Ashby operates remotely).
You want a set structure and rhythm to your projects.
You prefer a narrow job scope - interaction design only, design system only, etc.

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 in order to present confident assumptions about your proposals.
Using Figma to draw out your ideas and create visual artifacts for stakeholder alignment.
Writing specification docs (we call them specs!) that detail your design proposals. These documents are meant to get stakeholder alignment on the biggest decisions you want to make and are a core part of how we work at Ashby.
Taking ownership of larger product features and thinking through Jobs-To-Be-Done, navigation, information architecture, layout, interaction, etc.
Taking in customer feedback and using heuristics to build your own usability backlog and propose projects for engineers to take on.
Consolidating and refining our design system to be functional, aesthetic, and best-in-class.
At Ashby, Our Team And Interview Process Want To Help You Show Your Best Self. We’ll Dive Into Past Projects And Simulate Working Together And Talking Through Decisions. Our Interview Process Is Four Rounds With Some Casual Zoom Coffee In Between To Get To Know Each Other

• 75m design exercise and app teardown. Competitive salary and equity.
• Expect “Vacation?” Twelve weeks of fully paid family leave in the US. Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget. If you’re in the US, top-notch health insurance for you and your dependents with all premiums covered by us.

We’re being deliberate about building that environment from the ground up. 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.