Principal Product Designer (London / Dublin / Prague)
productboard · London, GBR · hybrid
Locations: London / Dublin / Prague
At Productboard, we're building the first agentic product management system. We're rethinking how product management is done in a world full of AI agents, and how we help our customers build what matters for their audience. AI is changing what an interface even is: static screens are giving way to conversations, generated artifacts, rich interactive UI, and open-ended workflows, often on the same screen.We're looking for a Principal Product Designer to be the UX architect of the product: a hands-on senior IC from an AI-first product company who defines the architecture and patterns that make Productboard one coherent, AI-first product rather than a collection of independently designed experiences, sets its design direction, raises the bar for design, usability, and UX architecture across every product team, and personally carries the hardest design work.This is a role with organization-wide scope and real decision rights, and partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and the Product Executive team. You'll decide how agentic workflows meet a structured product: how Spark's work lands in a purpose-built data model, visualizations, and documents, when a task should be a conversation, a generated artifact, or a conventional interface, and which of those patterns become product-wide standards. You'll make sure agents, artifacts, and structured UI hold together as one experience, and set a higher bar for everything that ships: coherent, usable end to end, and built on one architecture. Our users are product makers themselves. They can tell in the first minute whether a product was made with care, and design is how we win that minute.
Your responsibilities- Own Productboard's UX and interaction architecture. The information architecture, navigation model, and object model that make Productboard feel like one product. As Spark, our AI agent for product teams, reshapes what the product does, decide how new capabilities fit into that structure instead of becoming isolated features, and spot when a local decision will fragment the whole.
- Define the interaction patterns for an AI-first product. How users meet Spark, build trust in its output, delegate to it, and stay in control. Decide when an experience should be chat, rich interactive UI, a generated artifact, or a conventional interface, and how AI-generated outputs turn into actionable work. Nobody has cracked this yet. Define our answer so we build differentiated AI experiences, not AI features bolted onto an old interaction model.
- Decide what becomes standard. Which patterns teams adopt, evolve, or retire, and how design-system principles are interpreted across product domains. Codify them so teams decide faster, land on the same answer, and the bar rises everywhere at once, and so you can say of any pattern: this is the agreed pattern, this is why it works, and this is how every team applies it.
- Set the design direction and design language. Define what Productboard looks and behaves like as one product: the visual language, the interaction vocabulary, and the principles designers work from. Connect user insight, product strategy, and long-term vision into a direction the org can follow, and bring architecture and usability to the executive table with evidence.
- Raise the bar for end-to-end usability and cross-product coherence. Define what highly usable means at Productboard, continuously evaluate core product flows against it, and call it when a proposed experience is inconsistent, unclear, or below the usability bar. Drive the fixes across team boundaries. You are accountable for the end-to-end usability and consistency of what ships, and your findings feed the quality call on every launch.
- Be the lead voice in design critique. You are the person in the room who catches when a detail breaks the model, and the person designers come to when a pattern is unclear or a problem doesn't fit the architecture. Give domain designers strong architectural guidance and develop senior and staff designers through pairing and coaching. You're their architect, not their manager.
- Personally carry the hardest design work. Platform-level and foundational problems: the navigation model, object model redesigns, new surfaces, and new interaction primitives for human-agent collaboration. Own them from concept to coded prototype to shipped.
- Prototype in code by default. When words aren't settling a design debate, build the thing with AI coding tools. Turn ambiguous interaction and system questions into working prototypes, test them with users, and use them to align stakeholders and unblock engineering.
About you- 8+ years in product design as a senior individual contributor on complex products, ideally in product-led B2B SaaS with a mature design practice. You have never stopped designing, and your portfolio has recent work in it.
- Systems thinker: you see a product as a whole, its object model, information architecture, and how the parts relate, and you can hold that structure in your head while designing a single detail within it. Concept models, sitemaps, and flows are second nature, not extra deliverables.
- Proven bar raiser: you've owned the usability of an entire product, not a feature, and there's a product that is visibly more coherent and more usable because you were there.
- Agentic systems experience: you've designed products where an agent does real work on the user's behalf and the design problem is trust, control, and cold start, across chat, generated artifacts, and rich UI, not just one of them. You have real opinions on how these products should fit into structured UI, because you use the newest ones the week they ship.
- AI-first role model: AI agents are how you work, every day, for research, prototyping, building, and analysis. When a debate needs settling, you build a working prototype with Claude Code, Cursor, or whatever fits. Code is a means for you, not the identity.
- Excellent craft: your interaction and visual design are at a level where senior designers want your feedback, and you've set a design language others were glad to work in.
- Comfortable owning the call: you've set standards for teams that weren't yours, made the unpopular consistency call, and made it stick with reasoning and evidence rather than rank.
- Earned a seat at the roadmap: PMs and executives come to you for direction, not just design, because your understanding of users is deep enough to shape what gets built.
- Self-directed and evidence-driven: you identify what needs to be done and do it, land into teams gracefully, and collaborate with low ego. You balance intuition from years of experience with strategy, data, and measurement. Intuition opens the question, evidence closes it.
- Strategic communicator: you can align executives around a design direction with the same clarity you bring to critiquing a designer's prototype, and you build trust across Product, Engineering, and Design.
What's in it for you?- Be the UX architect of the first agentic product management system, a category being defined right now, where the patterns you set become the reference others copy.
- Hold real decision rights over an entire product's UX and use them to raise the bar for its architecture, patterns, and usability, with the mandate and executive partnership to actually change it.
- Define what AI-first product design means, at the moment the interface itself is being reinvented, and shape the direction the product takes.
- Operate the way the industry's best AI-first design teams do, with the tooling, velocity, and autonomy to match, and define the design language the team around you designs in.
- Design for product makers, the most discerning, design-literate audience there is. When it works on them, it works.
Our benefits include- Stock options
- MacBook + 34″ monitor
- Work from home stipend to support your home office setup
- 5 weeks of vacation + 9 sick days
- Flexible working ho