We’re at an inflection point. Our product is moving from classic SaaS interfaces to conversation-first, AI-native workflows. That shift changes the fundamentals: how people interact, what feels intuitive, and what “great design” even means at scale.
Text handles over 2 billion interactions a year. Each of those moments needs to feel clear, consistent, and intentional. Your job: define and enforce the standard of design excellence across the company. Not only by polishing pixels, but by setting the rules, principles, and workflows that make quality inevitable.
What You’ll Do:
Co-author and own the product design strategy for the Text App, ensuring that design defines how the product works at scale, not just how it looks.Represent design in company leadership planning, sitting at the table where priorities and resources are decided, and making sure design is a central part of the conversation.Work closely with Product and Engineering leaders to shape roadmaps and company direction, using design as a lever for differentiation and growth.Connect design decisions to measurable business outcomes — conversion, activation, retention — and establish systems to track and improve them.Define the standards for design at Text, including principles, interaction patterns, typography, motion, and accessibility, making “great design” objective, repeatable, and teachable.Introduce new AI-first patterns for conversational flows, latency, uncertainty, and agentic experiences, creating frameworks that set the industry standard.Establish the design operating system — reviews, feedback loops, and quality checks that protect craft without slowing delivery.Set hiring expectations, performance systems, design ops, and tooling.Insist on rigor in every detail, from accessibility to empty, error, and loading states, ensuring billions of interactions feel seamless and intentional, making the design invisible.
What We’re Looking For:
You’ve led at SaaS scale, with 8+ years in product design and at least 3 years guiding teams in environments serving thousands or millions of users.You’ve scaled design teams by building the systems that kept quality high as speed increased.You’ve deployed design tools and prototyping technology to increase the team’s velocity.You’ve shown how design can steer company strategy — shaping not only how products look, but what gets built, when, and why.You understand what happens when billions of micro-interactions add up. You know how to keep clarity in products where small details define the whole experience.You can take subjective “this feels right” and turn it into objective standards that align teams and eliminate endless debates.You care about the invisible parts of design — the empty states, the error messages, the flows that feel so natural that users don’t even notice them.You spend time with customers and turn their feedback, data, and stories into patterns and rules that scale across the product.You’ve built team practices that make people sharper and faster: reviews that clarify, feedback loops that catch issues early, and quality bars that raise craft without adding drag.You’ve owned the design org — hiring expectations, performance systems, and ops — and know how to make it work without bureaucracy.
Why This Role Matters
Text is not just evolving its interface; it’s redefining how users experience software in an AI-first world. The VP of Product Design will determine the principles and systems that make this shift successful — shaping not just the product, but the design culture and operating system of the company.
