Design Director (Product Design Prototyping)

The job in one line

You lead the design of products. You define what they should be, you build working prototypes of them yourself, and you shape how they go to market.

Why this role exists

Most agencies answer a product question with a deck. We want to answer it with something running on a phone.

We are a creative team inside a company that builds and runs technology for some of the largest companies in the world. That is an unusual place to sit. It means the products we imagine are products we are actually positioned to build. What we have been missing is the person in the middle: someone who can hold the product idea, the interface, and the market story at the same time, and who can make a real version of it in days instead of quarters.

That person did not exist five years ago at a price anyone could afford. Building a convincing prototype used to require an engineer. It does not anymore. AI tools have moved the hard part from writing the code to knowing what to build and having the taste to judge it when it appears. That is a creative job, and it sits on our team.

What you will do

• Define the product. Decide what the thing is. Which features, in what order, for which customer, solving which problem. You will write the kind of clear product definition a client can act on and an engineering team can build from — user stories, feature prioritization and acceptance criteria for the MVP, a roadmap past it, the go-to-market plan, and the foundation for how success gets measured once it is live. You will do this on client work, on pitches, and on products we invent ourselves.
• Prototype it . Not slides of a product. The product. You will build interactive, clickable, working prototypes using AI tools such as Claude Code, Claude Design, Cursor, v0, Figma Make, and whatever replaces them next year. Fast and rough on Monday, convincing enough to put in front of a client CEO by Friday. Your prototypes are how the rest of us find out whether the idea is any good.
• Land it . Design the go-to-market alongside the product itself. How it launches, who it is for, what it promises, how it gets adopted, how it earns its second version. On this team, the product and the story it tells are the same piece of work.
• Lead the work through. You will direct the designers on the products you define — setting the bar, running the critique, making the calls when the work needs to get better. The prototype is yours alone. Everything after it is a team, and you lead it.

What this looks like in practice

• A retail client asks us to reimagine their app. In week one you and a strategist map where the current app fails its customer. By week two you have written a feature definition and built three working prototypes of the ideas that matter most, so the pitch team is arguing about a real interaction instead of a wireframe. By week three you have the launch narrative. When we win, you stay on it and lead the design of the thing you defined. Then you do it again for a transportation client’s AI travel companion, again for a product we are building for the C-suite, and again for the next one.

How we will know it is working

• The prototypes are the visible part. The measurable part is what they do to everything downstream. Engineering teams ramp onto new client work faster, because the product is defined and demonstrable before they arrive. Analytics, QA and user testing set up faster, for the same reason. New business gets a working prototype in front of a client sooner and more often. Proactive ideation goes up in volume, because ideas can be shown instead of described. And we lean less on off-the-shelf capability, because building the right thing stops being expensive.

Who this is for

We are looking for one person who can hold three things at once. People arrive at that from different directions, and we are open about which.

You may come from product.

• You have been a product manager or product leader who was never satisfied handing off a requirements document. You have shipped real products people use. You have opinions about interfaces. Somewhere in the last two years you started building your own prototypes with AI tools instead of waiting for a sprint, and you have not stopped.

You may come from creative technology or design engineering.

• You have been the person in the agency who makes the thing that wins the pitch. You can code, or you can direct AI tools to code, well enou…