Welcome to Ashby!

In modern SaaS development, product teams often consist of a product manager, a designer, and ~4-5 engineers. The product manager briefs the designer who then designs. After designing, mocks are handed to the engineers.

Ashby takes a more principled approach. In actuality, design is required in varying degrees on each project. Sometimes, when using existing components to create yet another settings page, design is only required as a consult. Other times, design should effectively be the product manager and own a project from beginning to end. In these latter cases, it makes sense that the designer is even the one providing project updates and managing resources rather than constantly being pinged by a separate product manager.

This principled approach is what has allowed Ashby to take down incumbents in multiple verticals, all at once. We don't settle for the status quo - we actively resist reversion to the mean.

Currently, our Head of Product Design reports to Benji, the co-founder & CEO. Both Abhik and Benji (our founders) care deeply about design, which at first glance may seem counterintuitive given the number of full-time designers that we employ. The belief is not that design is unimportant, but rather that it should be owned by the product team collectively, not solely by a group of full-time designers who happen to have the job title.

The design department’s job at Ashby is not to make every single design decision but to equip our entire product team to make better decisions themselves, as well as edit decisions that PMs/Engineers choose to make. That, while tackling the biggest design challenges ourselves.

What We’re Building

Talent teams aspire to build a hiring process that identifies great candidates, moves them quickly through the interview process, and provides an excellent experience for the candidate. To accomplish this, recruiters perform thousands of daily tasks to coordinate and relay information between candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers. Teams struggle to keep up!

Scheduling a final round is an excellent example of our customers' challenges. A recruiter needs to collect availability from the candidate, identify potential interviewers, perform “Calendar Tetris” to find who is available to interview the candidate, schedule on the earliest date possible, and perform any last-minute adjustments as availability changes. They must perform this while considering the interview load on each individual and whether interviewers need to be trained and shadowing others.

Ashby provides talent teams with intelligent and powerful software that provides insights into where they’re failing and automates or simplifies many of the tasks they’re underwater with. We put a lot of effort into designing products that are approachable to beginners but mastered and extended by power users. In many ways, spreadsheets set the bar here (and are what we often replace!).

We have many customers, great revenue growth, years of runway, and amazing investors like YCombinator, Elad Gil, and Lachy Groom. I’ll share more once we meet.

Why you should or shouldn’t apply

Your qualifications:

• 4+ years of product design experience in desktop SaaS.

• Able to think from first principles instead of simply applying the “standard” UX processes.

• Can break down complex user problems by asking questions that narrow down the solution space.

• Enough experience that your intuition can solve many usability problems without having to rely solely on data & metrics or conducting user research.

• Curious & resourceful enough to come up with creative solutions and de-risk them appropriately.

• Strong skills in layout, navigation, IA, UI, and interaction design.

• Strong visual design skills and obsession with craft & details.

• As a bonus, you have experience at an early-stage startup or have spent time as a solo designer on a team.

You may want to apply if you’re excited about:

• Creating leverage and impact far and above what you'd see in a typical EPD product team structure. You won’t be a cog in the wheel, the wheel is not very big!

• Getting to work on all parts of a massive product surface area - spanning many user types, JTBDs, usability challenges, etc. Unlike in other organizations, you won’t be stuck working on one problem for many years.

• Helping reinvent the design model for modern enterprise software—you don’t have to build wireframes, user journeys, personas, etc. What matters is solving a customer’s problem; what tools you use are up to you.

• Covering all parts of the design process with a focus on design c