Forward-Deployed Product Designer

About the Role

We're looking for a Forward-Deployed Product Designer to lead product design for customer deployments and turn those learnings into reusable product patterns.

This is a client-facing, high-context design role. You will work directly with customers to understand their operations, translate complex workflows into clear product experiences, and collaborate closely with forward-deployed engineers, product managers, and internal product teams to ship successful implementations.

Beyond individual customer projects, you will also help Tailor compound its design knowledge: identifying recurring workflows, formalizing reusable UI patterns, and feeding project learnings back into our design system, component libraries, and product roadmap.

What You'll Do
Lead Product Design for Customer Projects

Work directly with customers to understand their business operations, user roles, workflows, pain points, and success criteria.

Translate complex operational requirements into clear user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and product specifications.

Own the design direction for customer-facing deployments, ensuring the final experience is intuitive, consistent, and aligned with the customer's actual business process.

Facilitate design reviews with customers and internal teams to drive clarity, alignment, and fast decision-making.
Bridge Customers, Product, and Engineering

Partner closely with forward-deployed engineers and product managers to ensure that what is designed, built, and shipped is aligned.

Help reduce ambiguity by turning customer conversations into actionable design decisions and implementation-ready requirements.

Communicate tradeoffs clearly across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Support onboarding, scoping, delivery, and iteration cycles with strong design judgment and customer empathy.
Build Reusable Design Patterns

Identify recurring customer needs, workflows, screens, and interaction patterns across deployments.

Contribute those learnings back into Tailor's design system, UI libraries, templates, and internal implementation patterns.

Help create repeatable design artifacts that make future deployments faster, more consistent, and higher quality.

Improve internal handoff flows, requirement intake, design documentation, and customer communication patterns.
Shape the Product Roadmap

Distill recurring customer insights into strategic product themes and high-impact feature opportunities.

Partner with product and engineering teams to prioritize improvements that advance Tailor's platform vision.

Use customer project learnings to help Tailor evolve from custom implementation patterns into scalable product capabilities.
What We're Looking For

5+ Years of Product Design Experience

Strong experience designing software products, preferably in SaaS, enterprise software, ERP, internal tools, operational systems, or developer platforms.

Ability to design complex, workflow-heavy products used by multiple roles and stakeholders.

Experience moving from ambiguous customer problems to clear product experiences and implementation-ready design specs.

Strong Customer-Facing Design Skills

Comfortable working directly with customers, facilitating discovery sessions, presenting design concepts, and incorporating feedback.

Able to understand both business requirements and user needs, then translate them into practical product decisions.

Strong communication skills - you can make complex workflows simple, visual, and actionable.

Systems Thinking and Design Craft

Organized, structured thinker who can reduce ambiguity and create clarity across teams.

Strong understanding of design systems, reusable components, interaction patterns, and product consistency.

Able to balance customer-specific needs with scalable product and platform patterns.

Technical Fluency

With the help of coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, etc.), you are expected to produce working prototype, submit PR, collaborate effectively with engineers, understand implementation tradeoffs, and ask the right questions.

Familiarity with APIs, data models, workflows, permissions, or configurable software platforms is a strong plus.

Location and Travel

Based in the United States or within its timezone.

Expected travel: approximately 10-20%.

Nice to Have

Experience with ERP, internal tools, operational SaaS, supply chain, inventory, order management, finance, or commerce systems.

Experience designing for low-code, no-code, composable, or developer-first platforms.

Consulting, implementation, or customer onboarding experience.

Experience contributing to or maintaining a design system or component library.

Comfortable supporting multiple stakeholders and balancing competing priorities across customer delivery and internal product work.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary: $130,000 - $170,000 + bonus

Benefits: Health, dental, vision, flexible PTO, and more