Product Designer - Consumer

Speak$120K — $150K *
Consumer Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 6+ years of product design experience crafting high-quality consumer products
  • Strong user-centric approach with empathy for diverse learners
  • Structured product thinking with the ability to frame problems and distill objectives
  • Demonstrated experience in integrating AI creatively into design processes
  • Ability to combine taste and craft while working efficiently
  • Effective communication skills for stakeholder collaboration and trust-building

Responsibilities

  • Shape overall strategy and design for consumer learning experiences at Speak
  • Design impactful moments for onboarding, habit formation, and retention
  • Prototype new learning experiences quickly using AI and interactive tools
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Data, Research, and Engineering teams
  • Utilize qualitative and quantitative insights to inform product decisions
  • Invent unique interaction patterns for AI-driven learning
  • Adapt and thrive in a fast-paced, ambiguous startup environment

Benefits

  • Opportunities for collaboration across various product areas as the company grows
  • Engagement with cutting-edge AI tools and technologies
  • Involvement in designing impactful user experiences that foster learner confidence
  • Working in an innovative, fast-moving startup culture
Full Job Description
Role & responsibilities

As a Product Designer focused on consumer experiences, you'll design the core moments that help learners build real-world speaking confidence: finding the right path, practicing with AI, getting feedback, staying motivated, and building a lasting learning habit.

Speak is inventing new interaction patterns for language learning - from AI tutoring and voice-first practice to roleplay, proficiency measurement, and personalized curriculum. You'll work across ambiguous, high-impact product areas where interaction design, learning science, AI behavior, and emotional craft all matter.
  • Shape strategy and end-to-end product experiences for Speak's consumer learning surfaces, bringing deep empathy for learners across cultures, motivations, and proficiency levels
  • Design across key growth moments - onboarding, activation, habit formation, retention, and subscription experiences - while protecting learner trust and long-term learning outcomes
  • Prototype quickly in AI tools, code, or interactive design tools to make new learning experiences feel real before they are fully built
  • Partner with Product, Data, Research, and Engineering to define opportunities, evaluate impact, and raise the quality bar for learner-facing product work
  • Use qualitative and quantitative signals to understand learner behavior, synthesize insights, and make strong product judgments
  • Invent novel interaction patterns for AI-powered learning that go beyond generic AI templates
  • Thrive in an ambiguous, fast-moving startup environment where the best answer often has to be discovered through making

The exact product area you will work on will depend on team needs and your strengths, but likely areas include onboarding, activation, personalized learning, speaking practice, subscriptions, and learner motivation. This role is primarily anchored in our consumer experience, with opportunities to collaborate across adjacent surfaces as Speak grows.

What we're looking for
  • 6+ years of product design experience. You have experience designing high-quality consumer products.
  • You stay close to users. You think about real people learning real languages in real contexts. You actively seek out the humans using the product, not just data about them and are able to synthesize valuable insights about them that inform strategy and direction. You seek ways to put your work in front of people, before you feel it's perfect just to learn something valuable.
  • Product thinking and structured judgment. You frame the problem before solving it and always know why you're doing something. You can distill what you're working on into simple narrative framings and key beats without being lost in the details.
  • AI-native workflow. You already use AI creatively in your process to unlock speed and quality and are eager to continue learning how to apply it in novel ways.
  • Taste and craft while moving fast. You can spot a great idea in a sea of okay ones and understand what's worth investing in building. You do this while moving quickly and know when to stay scrappy vs invest deeply in final polish.
  • Communication and stakeholder collaboration. You can own a room, build trust, and push back when something isn't right. You bring people into your work along the way knowing that multiple perspectives produce the strongest work.
We also love to see
  • Experience in language learning, education, or another domain with deep cross-cultural product surface area
  • A bias toward prototypes to communicate ideas, test assumptions, and make your thinking tangible
  • A strong portfolio that demonstrates user-centric thinking, high craft, and innovative interaction patterns
  • Contributions to design systems that scale beyond a single team
  • A point of view about agentic workflows you'd be excited to share with our team and ability to tinker directly in code


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