Head of Product Design

Job description

YOUR IMPACT Procurement is the single biggest cost position for industrial companies - often over 50% of revenue. It's also their biggest lever to drive profitability - something the European industry needs more urgently than ever. However, most companies still run procurement manually with outdated tools. As Head of Product Design, you'll define how humans and AI agents work together. Our product is shifting from screens users operate to agents users direct. That demands a fundamentally new design practice: one that creates the frameworks, patterns, and constraints within which AI agents operate, and that makes complex procurement decisions legible and trustworthy at a glance. You'll build the design team that makes this real. YOUR TASKS - Design Leadership: Build and lead the design team of ~4 product designers. Set the bar for craft, speed, and strategic impact. Establish design as a true partner in the product trio, not a service function. - Human-Agent Interaction Design: Define the interaction paradigm for a product where AI agents execute procurement workflows autonomously and buyers supervise, steer, and handle exceptions. You'll develop the mental models, patterns, and UI frameworks for it. - Design Systems for Agent-Native Products: Own and evolve our design system and component architecture that coding agents can reliably work within. Your frameworks need to be precise enough for LLM-driven development and flexible enough for rapid iteration. - UX for Complex Domains: Make deeply technical procurement concepts (should-costing, raw material indices, contract leakage) accessible and actionable for users who are not data analysts. Turn complexity into clarity. - Customer & User Insight: Drive user understanding on a company level by implementing best practices around user & UX research and be an advocate of our users within Tacto. Make sure every function is focused on solving real user problems. YOUR PROFILE - 6+ years in product design, with 2+ years leading design teams at high-growth technology companies known for design excellence - Strong collaborator with product and engineering to get to the best possible results for customers and the business - Deep experience designing for data-heavy, workflow-driven products. You know how to make information density an asset - Strong systems thinking. You design in frameworks and patterns, not just screens - Genuine fluency with AI as a design material. You've thought seriously about how LLMs, agents, and automation change what design even means, and you have a point of view on where it's going - You can move between strategic leadership and hands-on craft when needed - Fluent in English. German is a plus but not required WHY TACTO - Impact: You'll tackle one of the most important UX problems in enterprise software: how buyers supervise, steer and trust autonomous AI agents making procurement decisions with real consequences. No established playbook exists for this yet. Most SaaS companies are still designing forms and dashboards - we want you to write the next chapter - Ownership that compounds: The design function at Tacto is yours to define. Set the quality bar, build the team, shape the system. You're joining early enough that your decisions become the standard and late enough that the product, the customers and the stakes are real. - A domain that rewards depth: Procurement is data-heavy, expertise-driven and consequential. The decisions you're designing for have real financial impact on industrial companies. The best design work rarely happens in easy spaces. - The team: 100+ highly capable people, founded by CDTM/Berkeley alumni and backed by Sequoia & Index. Youʼll work closely with Josias (Head of Product), Adrian (Head of Engineering), André (CEO), and the leadership team - The setup: Munich-based, hybrid. Competitive comp + equity. OUR BACKGROUND Tacto is building the intelligence layer that connects AI to the physical world of manufacturing, starting with procurement. AI is transforming every industry, but it stops at the factory gate. The knowledge that holds manufacturing together - part costs, suppliers, materials - is scattered across systems and people. Over 50% of a product's cost originates from suppliers, making procurement the single largest cost lever in manufacturing and the missing connection between the digital and the physical world. Yet it still runs on Excel and legacy systems. We're changing that with our Procurement Intelligence Platform, trusted by hundreds of companies running billions of Euros of material. Based in Munich, we are 100+ passionate builders who are in-office, with high expectations, fast growth, and a lot of fun. We are supported by >€50m from Sequoia, Index, and Europe's leading tech entrepreneurs and industry veterans. WHY IT MATTERS Manufacturing forms Europe's economic backbone, driving a fourth of Europe's GDP and providing over 30% of jobs. These hidden champions and global market leaders manufacture the physical world around us, from the machines that build our cities to the medical devices that save lives. But the world is changing. The US dominates the digital world of bits. China is scaling the world of atoms, manufacturing at unprecedented speed and scale. Geopolitics are more uncertain than ever. Europe's strength lies in its deep industrial knowledge through generations of engineering. Manufacturing worldwide runs on European machines and software. But that heritage is only an advantage if we leverage it in the age of AI. Tacto builds the AI that connects Atoms and Bits, empowering our Industrial Base to Stay Stronger and building a lighthouse for European tech. WHAT WE OFFER The people at Tacto are passionate about building the organization, growing themselves, and our product while having fun and being real. We have high expectations, great talent density, and a culture where your ambition, performance, and agency are what count - not where you come from or how big your ego is. You'll grow at the forefront of AI, have real ownership and impact, and be surrounded by the best people in their field who challenge you and make you better every day. That is demanding and rewarding, but that's where we thrive. Besides that you have: - Money: Competitive salary & equity in the company with real upside, so you are invested in our success - Workplace: A vibrant in-office culture (> 4 days/week) in a beautiful office in central Munich - Development: A development budget and regular exposure to exceptional people, e.g., Lunch & Learns, peer mentoring, external speakers - Time off: 26 + 4 vacation days per year (4 fixed “company rest days”) as well as regular off-sites and team events - Health: Wellpass membership, of course, a fruit basket (!), and access to Jobrad, for your health - Family & Social Security: Voluntary pension contribution, voluntary KITA subsidy for your children Tacto is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, or gender identity. Please do not submit personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, data concerning your health, or data concerning your sexual orientation.