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.