Role Overview:Staff Product Designers at Aiwyn manage ambiguous projects autonomously and act as force multipliers across a business line. They excel at concept design, system design, and interaction design with high efficiency, balancing effort versus reward. This role contributes to product strategy, drives product vision in collaboration with product leads, and coaches/guides designers to help them grow and deliver impactful, high-quality work. Staff designers may lead design within a product team when needed and lead design initiatives that span multiple product teams within their business line to solve complex challenges.
Key ResponsibilitiesStrategy- Product & Competition: Deeply understand Aiwyn's products and competition across multiple product areas
- Customer Understanding: Identify gaps and opportunities in customer understanding that drive real business impact; understand the dual audience of accounting firm professionals and their end clients; navigate the balance between modern UX patterns and familiar legacy software paradigms
- Strategy & Vision: Grow your influence on the future vision for your product area; actively plan for how your designs will help us surpass our competitors; contributor to product strategy and driver for the product vision
- Commercial Thinking: Take ownership of your team's work reaching business outcomes for the business line; partner with your Product Marketing Manager to translate design strategy into customer-facing value propositions and contribute to competitive positioning through design differentiation
Execution- Understanding Problems: Identify new problems and opportunities to solve across product teams within your business line; lead design initiatives that span multiple product teams; coordinate design resources and priorities across teams; identify shared design patterns and system opportunities
- Research: Lead quantitative and qualitative research across your product area
- System Design: Solve complex system design challenges; design connected, modular systems that help us move faster in the future
- Diverging & Converging: Diverge and converge quickly and effectively; practice first-principles thinking for larger projects or when innovation is a requirement
- Interaction Design: Design simple and elegant interfaces for complex systems; refine the details of interaction design to achieve a high level of polish; act as a steward for our design system by driving its evolution, setting standards for quality and consistency, and ensuring its strategic alignment with product needs
- Visual Design: Design interfaces that are functional, beautiful, and delightful; raise the visual design bar in a way that creates business value
- Prototyping: Pair with an engineer to find design solutions through functional prototypes
- Shipping: Identify and resolve design operations bottlenecks; improve the way your business line ships product through process improvements, better handoffs, and strategic tooling
Behaviors- Values & Principles: Role model our principles and values within your product team; identify opportunities to refine our principles and values
- Growth Mindset: Consistently seek out opportunities to improve your product team; know and manage your triggers for fixed mindset; actively seek out and apply lessons and inspiration from the success of others; proactively motivate colleagues by sharing insightful and relevant feedback
- Helping People & Teams: Co-own the health of your product team; define hiring needs and role requirements in partnership with VP of Product Design; share your ideas with the industry by writing or talking publicly; support Aiwyn events; actively lead Design Guild initiatives and process improvements; mentor and guide designers through guild activities and design reviews
- Communication & Feedback: Use storytelling to communicate your work in an engaging way; anticipate feedback to address it proactively; communicate effectively with x-team leadership and cross-functional partners to influence their thinking and decisions; actively help your trio and product team align
- Efficiency & Progress: Be decisive to make progress, not just take action; drive resolving dependencies with others; maximize opportunities-when needed, go beyond the project and the role; raise problems when you see them
- Leadership: Own your product team's work, consistently seeking to provide more value; work beyond design, within and across product teams, peers, and partners to ensure your product team delivers high-quality, impactful results; identify and anticipate risks, proactively develop solutions
What Success Looks Like:Product Team & Business Line Impact- Ownership of product team reaching business outcomes with measurable results
- Solutions to complex system design challenges that impact multiple product teams within the business line
- Identification of new problems and opportunities that drive business value across the business line
- Improved product vision and strategy that positions us ahead of competitors
Design Excellence- Simple, elegant interfaces for the most complex systems in our product
- High level of polish that sets the standard for the entire design team
- Stewardship of the design system that accelerates the entire team
- Functional, beautiful, and delightful designs that create business value
Leadership & Influence- Designers you coach show observable growth and improved output
- Co-ownership of product team health with measurable improvements
- Successful influence on R&D and org leader thinking and decisions
- Resolution of dependencies and deadlocks across product teams
- Risk identification and proactive solution development
Strategic Contribution- Active contribution to product strategy with clear impact on product direction
- Product vision that inspires and aligns teams
- First-principles thinking applied to strategic projects
- Smart decisions on effort versus reward that maximize impact
Design Operations- Improvements to how the team ships product
- Refinements to principles and values that improve team function
- Public sharing of ideas that elevate Aiwyn's design reputation
- Support for recruiting and interviewing that raises the bar
Key CompetenciesMastery Expected:- Complex system design and architecture
- Interaction design at the highest level of polish
- Strategic thinking and product vision
- Cross-functional leadership and influence
- First-principles thinking and innovation
- Design mentorship and coaching
- Storytelling and executive communication
- Autonomous project management in ambiguous situations
Expected to Drive:- Design system evolution and standards
- Product strategy and commercial thinking
- Product team and design guild health
- Design operations and process improvements
- Cross-team coordination and alignment
Why Work at Aiwyn?- The big-picture value proposition of this role is simple: join us, and you'll be paid competitively to have freedom in solving worthwhile, challenging problems alongside other A-players at a fast-growing SaaS startup led by an experienced and successful team with industry experience
- AI-by-Default - you'll have access to best-in-class AI tools and work in an environment that embraces an AI-by-default mindset, where curiosity and experimentation are part of how we operate
- Remote-first organization
- Competitive compensation and benefits
- Stock options
- 401(k) matching
- Adventure Travel Stipend on each anniversary of your employment with Aiwyn
Our Values:- Relentless by Design
- Owners not Renters
- Trust at the Core
