Website:
theproducthighway.com
Job details:
Please read the job description carefully and fill out this short form to apply: https://forms.gle/ubeuTLWZ8WH1DjMWA
The Product Highway is an AI-native product strategy and engineering firm that partners with businesses from the earliest spark of an idea all the way through to enterprise scale. We grew from zero to multi-million ARR within our first year, working with clients across India, APAC, Europe, and North America.
AI got very good at the "how", shipping code faster than ever. But almost nothing has changed in the what: deciding what to build, why, and in what order. That's where we live. We believe software is an approximation of the real world, and what matters isn't lines of code or sprint velocity, it's whether the solution actually maps to how a business works, how customers think, and how value gets created.
From in-house AI project managers to near-universal adoption of tools like Cursor and Claude, we've rethought every conventional process from first principles. AI isn't a feature we offer, it's how we think, build, and deliver.
Why we're hiring
Our engagements are getting more design-intensive. We're building consumer products where the quality of the interface is the product. Apps where interaction patterns, motion, and visual craft are the difference between something people tolerate and something people love. That requires a designer who can carry the full weight of the visual and interaction layer across a mobile product.
The PM and Product Engineer own the what. They define problems, set priorities, and make product decisions. Your job is to make those decisions tangible. You take a problem statement and a set of requirements and turn them into screens, flows, interactions, and systems that feel inevitable when someone uses them. You own how the product looks, moves, and feels.
This is a craft role. We're hiring you because you're exceptionally good at designing mobile interfaces. You have an opinion about spacing, about how a transition should feel, about whether a bottom sheet or a modal is the right pattern for a given context. You notice when something is 2px off. You care about the details that most people can't articulate but everyone can feel.
You'll work across client engagements, primarily on mobile products (Android and iOS). You collaborate closely with the PM who sets the product direction and with engineers who build what you design. The quality of what ships is directly shaped by the quality of what you hand off.
Who we're looking for
- Regardless of role, every person at TPH shares these traits:
- End-to-end owners. You own outcomes, not tasks. If something you're responsible for falls through a crack, that's on you, because bugs are easier to fix, misalignment is expensive.
- Clear, direct communicators. Bad news doesn't get better with age. You surface problems early and communicate with precision.
- Uncompromising on quality. You have a quality bar that's yours, not your manager's. You won't ship something you wouldn't stand behind, even under deadline pressure.
- AI-obsessed. You see AI as how work gets done, not a nice-to-have. If you're still doing something manually that AI could handle, you feel that as friction, not normalcy.
- Structured thinkers. When faced with an ambiguous problem, you break it down, reason through the trade-offs, and arrive at a position. You don't wait for someone to tell you the answer.
What you'll own
Visual Design & Interaction
- Own the visual layer of the products you work on. Every screen, every state, every transition. You're the reason the product feels polished, not just functional.
- Design high-fidelity screens for mobile apps across Android and iOS, with a strong understanding of each platform's conventions and where it's worth breaking them.
- Own interaction design and motion. You think about how elements enter and exit, how feedback feels, how a swipe or a long-press should respond. Microinteractions aren't an afterthought for you.
- Design for expressive, consumer-facing products. Think voice UIs, sticker pickers, emoji systems, audio controls, media-rich chat interfaces. Products where delight matters as much as usability.
Design Systems & Component Libraries
- Build and maintain design systems that scale. Typography, color, spacing, component libraries, interaction patterns. You create the foundation that keeps a product visually coherent as it grows.
- Ensure components are designed with engineering handoff in mind. Your Figma files are organized, your specs are clear, your naming conventions make sense to developers.
- Own cross-platform consistency. You know how to design a system that feels native on both Android and iOS without maintaining two entirely separate design languages.
Collaboration & Handoff
- Work with the PM to understand the problem and constraints before you start designing. You don't need to define the problem yourself, but you need to fully understand it so your design actually solves it.
- Collaborate with engineers throughout the build, not just at handoff. You're available for questions, you review implementations, and you flag when something doesn't match the design.
- Present your work and explain your decisions. When the PM or the client asks "why this pattern?", you have a clear answer rooted in the user's context, the platform's constraints, or the interaction model you've chosen.
- Incorporate feedback quickly. You don't treat design as precious. You iterate fast, test assumptions visually, and move toward the right answer through exploration.
- User Experience. While the PM owns the product logic, you own the experience of using it. You think about flows end-to-end: onboarding, empty states, error states, edge cases. You don't just design the happy path.
- Bring a strong instinct for how real people use mobile apps. You know where thumbs rest, how scroll fatigue works, what makes a bottom navigation feel intuitive, and when a gesture is clever versus confusing.
- Advocate for the user's experience in design reviews and sprint discussions. If something feels off, you say so and you show why.
Must-haves
- 3–5 years designing mobile apps that shipped to real users on Android, iOS, or both. You have a portfolio of work you can walk us through.
- Exceptional visual craft. Your screens look polished. Your spacing is intentional. Your typography choices are deliberate. This is immediately visible in your portfolio.
- Strong interaction and motion design instincts. You think about transitions, gestures, and feedback as core parts of the design, not finishing touches.
- Fluent in Figma. Auto-layout, components, variants, prototyping. Your files are clean enough that another designer or an engineer can pick them up without a walkthrough.
- You've built or contributed to a design system. You understand tokens, component architecture, and how to design for reuse without sacrificing flexibility.
- You understand platform conventions for Android (Material) and iOS (HIG) well enough to make informed decisions about when to follow them and when to diverge.
- You work fast without sacrificing quality. In a services environment, you'll often need to move from problem to high-fidelity screens within a sprint. That pace needs to feel natural, not stressful.
- You can take direction from a PM or Product Engineer on what to solve and independently own how it looks and feels. You don't need someone to art-direct you.
Strong signals
- You've designed consumer social, messaging, or media apps. Products where expression, personality, and delight are central to the experience.
- Experience designing voice or audio interfaces. Recording controls, playback UIs, waveform visualizations, push-to-talk patterns.
- You've worked in a fast-paced agency, studio, or services environment where you shipped multiple products across different domains.
- Strong motion design skills. You prototype animations, you think about easing curves, and you can articulate why a 200ms transition feels right but a 400ms one feels sluggish.
- Experience designing for young audiences (16–24). You understand the visual language, interaction patterns, and cultural context that resonates with this demographic.
- You've worked closely with React Native or Flutter engineers and understand the constraints and possibilities of cross-platform mobile frameworks.
AI-native expectations
- Uses AI tools daily in your design workflow. Generating visual explorations, creating placeholder content, iterating on copy, mocking up variations quickly.
- Comfortable evaluating AI-generated design assets and knowing when they're production-ready versus when they need refinement.
- Thinks about how AI changes the design process. You use it to move faster through exploration so you can spend more time on the decisions that matter.
Not the right fit if
- Your portfolio is primarily web dashboards and enterprise SaaS. We need someone whose strength is consumer mobile.
- You think of yourself as a "UX designer" who hands off wireframes and expects someone else to make them look good. At TPH, the designer who defines the interaction is the same person who polishes the pixels.
- You need a week to go from requirements to a first design. Our pace requires you to produce high-quality work quickly, and you should find that energizing.
- You're uncomfortable working without detailed creative briefs. The PM will give you the problem and the constraints. The visual and interaction direction is yours to own.
- You don't have strong opinions about how things should look and feel. We need a designer who pushes the work forward with a point of view, not one who waits for feedback to know if something is good.
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