Product Designer

About Ashby

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: we have tens of millions in ARR, very low churn, and many years of runway. We're backed by amazing 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 to you! The product manager briefs the designer who then designs. After designing, mocks are handed to the engineers.

We take a more principled approach here  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.

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. To accomplish this, recruiters perform thousands of daily tasks to coordinate and relay information between candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers. Teams struggle to keep up!

Scheduling a final round is an excellent example of our customers' challenges. A recruiter needs to collect availability from the candidate, identify potential interviewers, perform “Calendar Tetris” to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and perform any last‑minute adjustments as availability changes. They must perform this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others.

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. We put a lot of effort into designing 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!).

• 10+ years of product design experience, with the majority being in desktop SaaS
• Able to take huge, ambiguous projects and break them down into actionable parts
• Able to speak to patterns of the highest functioning design teams and how to create an environment of high performance
• Able to leverage designers' superpowers to influence engineering, product, and the rest of the company
• Able to create standards and principles that will help improve the quality of design across the product org
• Able to think from first principles instead of simply applying the “standard” UX processes.
• Enough experience that your intuition can solve most 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
• Best‑in‑class skills in layout, navigation, IA, UI, and interaction design.
• Obsession with craft & details.
• You have experience at an early‑stage startup or have spent time as a solo designer on a team.

• You feel uncomfortable designing independently without much guidance from a PM or design management.
• You’re uncomfortable having your…