Product Designer

Job description

### **About us:** Shapes is on a mission to reinvent how companies run their people operations in the AI era. We’re building the world’s first truly AI-native people platform, a single place where HR processes come together, get customized in minutes, and actually run themselves. We’re a small, fast-moving team that loves building ambitious things with a bias for action. If you want to shape the foundation of something big, not just plug into an existing machine, this is the place. ### **About the role:** We’re looking for a Product Designer who is obsessed with understanding the problem space- people, workflows, constraints - not just producing screens. You’ll own meaningful parts of the product end-to-end: from shaping problem definitions, to mapping journeys across multiple personas (HR, managers, employees, leadership), to shipping experiences that feel simple on the surface but are backed by deep thinking. You’ll dig into how our AI-powered workflows actually work, and how they should feel for different types of users. You’ll work closely with product, engineering, and go-to-market partners, bringing clarity where things are fuzzy and momentum where things are stuck. If you love complexity, enjoy asking “why” ten times, and thrive in a high-speed, high-ambiguity environment with a lean, experiment-first approach - this one is for you. ### **What you'll do:** - **Own end-to-end design** for core areas of the Shapes platform - discovery, flows, interaction, UI, and launch. - **Deeply understand our users and personas**: HR leaders, people managers, employees, execs—how they think, what they need, where they struggle. - **Turn ambiguity into clarity**: help define the problem, narrow scope, align on success metrics, and propose clear design directions. - **Design user journeys and workflows** for complex, multi-step HR processes and AI automations, keeping them intuitive and trustworthy. - **Create and iterate quickly** on flows, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs -knowing when “just enough” is enough. - **Partner tightly with PM and engineering** from concept to rollout, making trade-offs explicit and ensuring the final product matches the intent. - **Collaborate across the company** (product marketing, CS, sales) to keep the product experience aligned with how we position and sell it. **Contribute to and evolve our design system**, ensuring consistency while leaving room for experimentation and speed. - **Use data and feedback loops** (user interviews, usage analytics, support signals) to refine and improve what we ship. - **Advocate for great communication**: Facilitate discussions, and help the team reason about users and product behavior. ### **What you have:** - **4–5+ years** designing digital products, ideally B2B SaaS or complex, workflow-heavy tools. - A **portfolio that tells stories**: clear problem, constraints, your thinking, and the impact -beyond just polished UI. - Demonstrated **depth in product thinking**, - Strong **interaction and UX skills**, plus solid visual craft - you care about both how it works and how it feels. - Experience working **end-to-end**: research, mapping flows, prototyping, iterating with stakeholders, and supporting implementation. - **Exceptional communication and collaboration** skills: you’re comfortable leading discussions, aligning with PMs, and working closely with engineers. - High **comfort with speed and unknowns**: you can move fast without losing thoughtfulness, and you know when to go lean vs. deep. - A **systems mindset**: you think in patterns, not just pages; you design for scalability, reusability, and future change. - Curiosity and openness to **AI as part of your workflow** - for exploration, prototyping, or reasoning, not just visuals.