Who we're looking for
We're looking for a product designer who can take a problem from an early, unclear state through to a working prototype, and who builds those prototypes themselves.
Three requirements matter most. High ownership, meaning you drive a problem to a result without being managed through it. Product thinking, meaning you can state the customer problem precisely and be specific about what in your solution addresses it and why you expect that to work. And building prototypes yourself, so that something real and testable exists without waiting for engineering. Design craft is assumed. These three are what the role actually depends on.
What the role covers
The role sits on SmartyMe, our mobile educational app, and covers five areas:
- Own problems rather than tasks.
Work usually arrives as a problem, not a detailed spec from a product manager. You'd be responsible for understanding why, deciding what to do, and carrying it through discovery, design, prototype, launch, and measurement.
- Product thinking.
Getting to a precise statement of what the user is actually struggling with, using user conversations, data, and the product itself. Then being specific about which part of your solution addresses that problem and why you expect it to work, rather than presenting a design and reasoning backwards from it. Knowing what you're solving is the part that decides whether the rest of the work matters.
- Build working prototypes yourself.
We prototype with AI tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Replit or whatever you work fastest in. The aim is something users can actually use within days, without waiting for engineering capacity. This is a core part of the job rather than an occasional extra.
- Hypotheses and metrics, not only design.
You'd own specific product branches together with the hypotheses behind them, and work with the PM as a peer rather than as a service function. In practice that means naming the metric you expect to move before you start, and being the person who knows afterwards whether it moved. Branch activation and branch cancel rate are what we're currently judged on.
- Neat and clean design solutions.
We care about solutions that are simple and consistent: sensible structure, careful spacing and typography, states and edge cases handled, and nothing on the screen that doesn't need to be there. Speed of building doesn't excuse a sloppy interface.
What's in the role for you
- A team to learn from. The product team is experienced and includes people who previously worked at Miro, Palta, Uber, and Bolt. Everyone here runs their own initiatives, so the people around you already work the way this role asks you to. At this size you'd be in the room when product decisions get made rather than hearing the outcome later, and you'd get direct feedback on your thinking from people who have done this at larger scale.
- Shaping mobile learning in a product with more than a million users. SmartyMe is live and used daily, so the changes you make show up in the numbers within days rather than quarters. Very few designers get to work at that scale of feedback on something they own outright.
- Freedom to test hypotheses. If you can prototype it, you can test it. You don't need to assemble consensus or wait for a planning cycle to try an idea, and production has clear risk guardrails rather than blanket approvals.
- Broad scope for one seat. Design, product decisions, and building in a single role. It's a rare combination to practise in one place, and the three skills compound rather than compete.
- A short path to decisions. You'd report directly to the VP of Product and partner with a strong product manager, with no layers between your work and the people who decide. AI tools are part of how we work rather than a side experiment.
Technical skills
3+ years of product design including mobile apps.
- Product design experience: hands-on work on real products, ideally mobile-first consumer apps. EdTech, wellness, or habit-building products are a plus.
- Prototyping with AI tools: you build working prototypes yourself in Claude Code, Codex, Replit, or similar. This is a requirement. Pushing small production changes is a plus, not an expectation.
- Product and metrics literacy: you can express work as a hypothesis, covering what should change, roughly how much, and what would indicate you were wrong.
- AI features: comfortable designing around AI-powered functionality and hypotheses that keep shifting.
- Figma: components, auto layout, variants, prototyping, versioning.
Nice to have: activation and retention work, games or content-heavy products, design systems, something you've shipped independently.
How you work
These carry as much weight in our decision as the technical skills above.
- Ownership (the primary requirement). You take a problem and stay accountable for the outcome, not for the hand-off. That means deciding without full information, unblocking yourself, chasing the people you need, and reporting where things stand before anyone asks. The team is compact and nobody will be managing you through the steps.
- Proactivity. Identifying what needs doing and starting it, rather than waiting for the problem to be assigned and defined. A meaningful share of the work you do here will be work you proposed.
- Comfort with ambiguity. Problems arrive underdefined, and turning them into something workable is part of the job rather than a prerequisite for starting it.
- Preference for shipping. Getting to a rough working version early rather than extending the planning stage.
- Attention to craft. Spacing, clarity, copy, and the details in between.
- Direct communication. Explaining design decisions openly in Slack, Figma, and live sessions, raising problems early, and disagreeing when you think a decision is wrong.
- Learning speed. We weight rate of improvement more heavily than years of experience.
Hiring process
- Portfolio screening. We look at how you framed problems and what came out of them, including the parts that didn't go smoothly. Cases with the reasoning shown tell us more than a set of finished screens.
- Recruiter screening. Basics, level, motivation, and logistics.
- Job and partnership fit interview (45 min). With the SmartyMe product manager, the person you'd work with most closely. The actual work of the role and how the two of you would divide and share it.
- Team fit interview (45 to 60 min). With the VP of Product. Your background and product thinking, mostly through specific cases: something you initiated yourself, something you owned end to end, and something you decided without enough information.
- Live working session (60 to 90 min). The final and main stage. We bring a real SmartyMe problem with incomplete data and no spec. We narrow it together, form a hypothesis, and you build something during the session using your own tools. We're interested in the reasoning and in how quickly you get to something real, not in a finished answer.
