Lead Product Designer

Job description

We are looking for a Lead Product Designer to oversee our chat product experience across mobile and desktop platforms.

This role will lead the design direction for our chat products, manage a small team of product designers, and work closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Data, and leadership teams to deliver high-quality, user-centered experiences.

The ideal candidate should be strong in product thinking, interaction design, team leadership, and execution quality. This person should be able to balance user needs, business goals, technical constraints, and product speed.

Key responsibilities

Product design leadership

• Own the end-to-end design direction for chat products across mobile and desktop.
• Define clear UX principles, experience standards, and interaction patterns for chat, messaging, communication, and community-related features.
• Translate product strategy into practical user journeys, flows, wireframes, prototypes, and final UI designs.
• Ensure the product experience is consistent, scalable, and easy to use across platforms.
• Work closely with Product Managers to shape product direction, prioritize problems, and validate solutions.
• Partner with Engineering to ensure design quality is maintained during implementation.

Design execution and quality

• Lead key design initiatives from discovery to delivery.
• Review major product flows to ensure usability, clarity, visual quality, accessibility, and consistency.
• Improve design quality across both mobile and desktop experiences.
• Use data, user research, usability testing, and product feedback to improve design decisions.
• Identify UX issues in existing products and propose practical improvements.
• Ensure designs are well-documented and ready for engineering handoff.

Cross-functional collaboration

• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Marketing, Customer Support, and leadership teams.
• Communicate design rationale clearly to both product teams and senior stakeholders.
• Align stakeholders around user problems, trade-offs, and design decisions.
• Help the team move fast without sacrificing user experience quality.
• Contribute to product planning, roadmap discussions, and feature definition.

Qualifications

Experience

• 5+ years of product design experience, preferably with consumer products, communication products, social products, SaaS, or mobile apps.
• Strong portfolio showing product thinking, UX process, interaction design, and polished UI execution.

Skills

• Strong understanding of mobile and desktop UX patterns.
• Strong interaction design and information architecture skills.
• Strong visual design craft with attention to detail.
• Good understanding of design systems and scalable component-based design.
• Good communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to give clear, constructive design feedback.

Nice to have

• Experience designing chat, messaging, collaboration, community, or social products.
• Experience with privacy-first products, online safety, or trust-focused user experiences.
• Experience using AI tools to support design exploration, prototyping, research synthesis, or design documentation.