Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Founding Designer

🎯 Role Definition

As our Founding Designer, you are more than a designer; you are a product visionary and a key strategic partner. You will join the core leadership team and take full ownership of our company's design function, from high-level product strategy and brand identity to the hands-on execution of every pixel. This is a rare opportunity to build a product and a brand from a blank canvas, defining the user experience that will captivate our first customers and establish our market presence. You will work directly with the founders to translate complex ideas into simple, elegant, and intuitive solutions, and you will be the ultimate advocate for our users in every decision we make.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Product Designer
Lead Product Designer
Art Director / Design Lead at a larger tech company or agency

Advancement To:

Head of Design
VP of Design / Chief Design Officer
Co-founder / Founder

Lateral Moves:

Head of Product
Creative Director

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Own the end-to-end design process, from initial discovery and user research to final high-fidelity mockups and implementation, ensuring a cohesive and intuitive user journey.
Collaborate intimately with the founders and engineering lead to define product strategy, feature roadmaps, and long-term vision, acting as the primary voice of design and user advocacy.
Establish, evolve, and evangelize a comprehensive design system and visual identity that scales with the company, ensuring consistency across all product and brand touchpoints.
Conduct and synthesize qualitative and quantitative user research, including user interviews, usability testing, and competitive analysis, to deeply understand user needs and pain points.
Translate abstract concepts, complex workflows, and business requirements into tangible design artifacts, including user flows, wireframes, interactive prototypes, and pixel-perfect UIs.
Design and deliver an exceptional user experience across our entire product suite, including web and mobile platforms, ensuring a seamless and delightful interaction.
Create and define the company's brand identity, including logo, typography, color palette, and overall aesthetic, and apply it to marketing materials, pitch decks, and our website.
Champion a culture of design thinking and user-centricity throughout the organization, empowering非-designers to appreciate and contribute to a great user experience.
Work hand-in-hand with engineers to ensure the faithful and high-quality execution of your designs, providing clear specifications and feedback throughout the development cycle.
Rapidly iterate on designs based on user feedback, data analytics, A/B testing results, and evolving business goals in a fast-paced startup environment.
Act as a generalist who can fluidly switch between UI, UX, user research, and brand design, comfortable with ambiguity and taking on tasks outside a traditional design role.
Develop and articulate a clear, compelling design vision and strategy that aligns with and informs the company's overarching mission and objectives.
Help recruit, onboard, and mentor future members of the design team, setting the standard for design excellence and team culture as the company grows.
Balance the need for speed and execution with a commitment to quality, making pragmatic trade-offs to ship products quickly while maintaining a high bar for design.
Facilitate creative workshops, design sprints, and brainstorming sessions to foster innovation and cross-functional collaboration.
Design compelling marketing and sales assets, including landing pages, email campaigns, and social media graphics, to support go-to-market efforts.
Stay at the forefront of design trends, tools, and best practices, continuously bringing fresh ideas and improved processes to the team.
Define and track key user experience metrics (e.g., task success rate, user satisfaction) to measure the impact of design decisions and inform future iterations.
Craft compelling narratives and presentations to communicate design concepts, research findings, and strategic rationale to the team, investors, and other stakeholders.
Manage the entire product design lifecycle, from a vague idea on a whiteboard to a fully-realized feature in the hands of users, and its subsequent improvement.
Proactively identify opportunities for product and user experience improvements, bringing forward unsolicited ideas that can drive business value and user delight.

Secondary Functions

Support the creation of investor pitch decks and other fundraising materials, ensuring a professional and compelling visual narrative.
Contribute to the company's content strategy by creating illustrations, infographics, and other visuals for blog posts and whitepapers.
Help define and shape the company's culture, values, and internal processes as a member of the founding team.
Document design principles, patterns, and processes to build a foundation for the future design organization.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Mastery of modern design and prototyping tools, particularly Figma, and proficiency in the Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop).
Deep expertise in user-centered design methodologies, including conducting user interviews, persona development, and journey mapping.
Proven ability to create and maintain scalable Design Systems from scratch.
Strong command of information architecture, interaction design, and visual design principles.
Experience with a wide range of usability testing methods (moderated, unmoderated, A/B testing) and synthesizing results into actionable insights.
⚫️ High-fidelity prototyping skills using tools like Principle, Framer, or Figma's built-in capabilities.
A foundational understanding of front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) to facilitate effective collaboration with engineers.
Experience designing for responsive web and native mobile (iOS/Android) platforms.
Excellent visual design skills with a strong sense of typography, color theory, and layout.
Experience with Webflow or similar no-code tools for building marketing sites is a strong plus.
Ability to analyze product usage data and metrics to inform design decisions.

Soft Skills

Extreme Ownership: A proactive, self-starting mentality with a strong sense of responsibility for the product's success.
Exceptional Communication: The ability to brilliantly articulate design decisions and strategic rationale to any audience.
Strategic Thinker: Can see the bigger picture and connect design initiatives to business outcomes.
High Adaptability: Thrives in a fast-paced, ambiguous, and rapidly changing startup environment.
User Empathy: A deep, innate desire to understand and solve problems for users.
Collaboration: A natural team player who builds strong relationships with engineering, product, and leadership.
Pragmatism: The ability to balance perfection with speed, knowing when to ship and when to iterate.
Autonomy: Can manage projetos complexos from start to finish with minimal oversight.
Leadership Potential: The desire and ability to build and lead a design team in the future.
Storytelling: Can craft compelling narratives around the product and design vision.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

A compelling portfolio of work demonstrating excellence in 0-to-1 product design and user-centered design principles is required, regardless of formal education.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor's or Master's degree in a relevant field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Graphic Design
Interaction Design
Psychology or Cognitive Science

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

5 - 8+ years of professional product design experience, with a significant portion spent working on new products from conception to launch.

Preferred:

Prior experience as the first or sole designer in an early-stage, venture-backed startup.
A portfolio that showcases a strong process and shipped products for both web and mobile.
Demonstrable experience building and launching a v1 product and iterating it to find product-market fit.
Experience in both B2B and B2C product design is a plus.