Product Designer Job Description
A product designer job description template, plus the ATS keywords hiring teams screen for and how much research and front-end work postings expect.
"Product Designer" covers UX and UI work at minimum, and at a lot of companies covers considerably more than that. It's worth reading a posting under this title as three possible jobs layered on top of each other: the design work itself, the user research needed to know what to design, and the front-end implementation needed to get it built to spec. A well-scoped posting is honest about how much of the second and third parts is actually yours.
That layering is the pattern worth naming directly, because it's common enough to have a shape: a company that can't justify headcount for a dedicated researcher and a design-systems engineer will sometimes fold both jobs into one "Product Designer" req instead, at one designer's salary. That isn't automatically a bad job — plenty of people like the breadth — but it is a different job than one where design, research and implementation are three separate roles, and the posting's requirements section is where you can tell which one you're looking at. A line reading "comfortable running your own usability tests" or "strong HTML/CSS skills" is doing real work; it's not boilerplate.
As with the rest of this family, the resume matters less here than the portfolio. A candidate with three years and a portfolio that shows a messy problem, a process, and a shipped outcome will usually beat a candidate with eight years and a gallery of polished final screens with no visible reasoning. Hiring managers read the portfolio first for exactly that reason.
Halbrenn · Austin, TX
Full-time · Hybrid
$95,000 – $130,000
About the role
Halbrenn is hiring a Product Designer for the dispatch experience team — the screens field-service and logistics dispatchers use to assign and track jobs in real time. You'll partner with one product manager and three engineers, owning design end to end for your area rather than handing off wireframes to someone else.
This is a hybrid role based in our Austin office, three days a week. There's no dedicated researcher staffed on this team, so a real part of the job is running your own lightweight research — you're not expected to be a specialist in it, but you are expected to talk to users before you design for them.
What you'll do
- Own the end-to-end design of features in the dispatch experience, from early sketches through handoff-ready specs.
- Run and synthesize your own lightweight user research — moderated sessions, usability tests — since a dedicated researcher isn't staffed on this team.
- Maintain and extend our shared design system in Figma, keeping components consistent across the product.
- Partner with engineering during implementation, reviewing built UI against spec and calling out drift before it ships.
- Turn ambiguous problems, like "dispatchers keep missing overdue jobs," into testable design hypotheses.
- Present design rationale to product and engineering stakeholders, and defend decisions with reasoning, not preference.
- Size design work honestly during quarterly planning, including the research time it actually needs.
- Give and receive critique in a weekly design review without it turning into a status meeting.
What we're looking for
- 3+ years designing shipped B2B or B2C software, with a portfolio that shows process, not just final screens.
- Production-quality Figma skills, including component libraries and auto-layout.
- Experience running your own basic user research — interviews, usability tests — without waiting on a dedicated researcher.
- Working knowledge of how the product is actually built, enough to know roughly what a design costs in engineering time.
- A portfolio that walks through at least one project end to end: the messy problem, the process, and the shipped result.
- Able to give and take direct critique without it becoming personal.
Nice to have
- Experience owning or significantly contributing to a design system used by more than one team.
- Enough HTML/CSS fluency to make small implementation fixes yourself instead of filing a ticket for them.
- Experience designing for an operationally heavy or field-service B2B product.
- Formal training or a portfolio-demonstrated fluency in research methods beyond basic user interviews.
- Experience presenting design work directly to executives or customers.
Benefits
- Medical, dental and vision coverage, with employee premiums covered in full.
- 401(k) with a 4% company match, vested immediately.
- Hybrid schedule: three days a week in the Austin office.
- $1,000 annual budget for design tools, courses or a conference.
- Twenty days of paid time off plus company holidays.
Salary range
As posted for this sample role. Real pay varies by employer, location and experience.
$95,000–$130,000/ yr
ATS keywords for this role
The applicant tracking system (ATS) — the recruiting software a hiring team searches and filters applicants with — will screen for these. Weight shows how central each one is to this specific posting.
Required and central (4)
Important (7)
Mentioned in passing (6)
Frequently asked questions
Is Product Designer the same as UX Designer or UI Designer?
Close enough that the titles are often used interchangeably, especially at smaller companies. Where a distinction gets drawn, "Product Designer" tends to imply ownership of both UX and UI plus more accountability for the outcome, while "UX Designer" or "UI Designer" can mean a narrower slice of the work. The requirements list tells you more than the title does.
Do I need to know how to code?
Usually not to ship production code, but basic HTML/CSS fluency is increasingly common to see listed, and a posting that requires real React fluency is effectively describing a hybrid design-engineer role at a design-role salary. Worth clarifying in the first conversation how much implementation work is actually expected.
Will I be doing user research in this role?
Often yes, informally, even when "research" isn't in the title. If a team doesn't have a dedicated UX researcher, that work doesn't disappear — it usually lands on whoever's designing the feature. If the posting doesn't say either way, it's a reasonable thing to ask directly.
This was a sample. Your resume should be tailored to the real thing.
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