Senior Product Designer

Foster is a social network for writers.

On Foster, writers submit ideas and drafts for edits from interested and qualified contributors. Our collaborative approach to writing transforms seedlings of ideas into timeless, polished pieces of writing.

Today, Foster serves a fast-growing, tight-knit community of online writers. Soon, we plan to serve millions of people who write on the Internet.

With that ambition comes a number of invigorating product and design challenges:

• How can we make collaborating on ideas fun and delightful?
• How do we define and connect the atomic units of writing?
• What’s the best way to visualize the evolution of an idea into a polished piece of writing?
• What interactions and incentives drive the most constructive engagement between users?
• What are the lowest-friction ways to give high-impact feedback on writing?

At bottom, we’re building a platform to facilitate mass collaboration on ideas. We need a Senior Product Designer who can envision and deliver a nutritious, fun experience for our users.

More on Foster

Writers love Foster. In our first year, our users collaborated on more than 1,000 pieces together and publicly thanked each other in published work more than 1,400 times. On average, writers in Foster rate the impact of the edits they receive as a 8/10.

We are funded by top writers and VCs. We just wrapped up Y Combinator and a Seed round led by Slow Ventures, with participation from 20+ top online writers. Our founders Dan and Stew have built multiple companies from seed stage all the way through ~$100M exits.

Our team has deep design and product expertise. Before we build something, we spend countless hours talking to users and iterating on designs. We believe simplicity is a consequence of deep contemplation and experimentation.

Your Qualifications

If the following describes you, let's chat!

• You have a multi-year writing or editing practice and the written word plays a meaningful role in your life.
• You have experience designing consumer-facing products - ideally, social products or text editors, or both.
• You have a “show, don’t tell” mindset and default to action.
• You are a design generalist and enjoy working across interaction and visual design.
• You have expertise designing across multiple platforms – specifically, web, iOS, and Android.
• You have deep compassion for the people who will use your product. You love imagining ways to surprise and delight them. You consider talking to users a critical aspect of your job.
• You have a deep grasp of how typography and well-crafted prompts can impact a product’s function – you obsess over the visual aesthetics of text, as well as its content.
• You have deep competence with collaborative design tools like Figma.
• You invite other stakeholders into the design process and are never satisfied with your understanding of the problem you are trying to solve.

How We Run Hiring

1. Apply to this job posting. Please include a link to your personal site, Dribble, or another portfolio.
2. An intro call with the founders so we can learn about each other. We’re most interested in learning why you were motivated to apply.
3. A small task to complete similar to a problem you would encounter as a member of the team. The task will take ~4 hours and we’ll pay you for your time.
4. Another call to present your work. You can expect a few more detailed questions so we get an understanding of how you think.

Your first 6 months with us

In your first 6 months, you will:

• Ship a UI improvement your first day - find something in the UI that irritates you, design an improvement, and have our engineering team build and deliver it to staging.
• Talk to at least 20 of our users in your first month.
• Lead design and help manage the delivery of at least one new user-facing feature per week.
• Audit the existing web and mobile app, identify obvious areas of improvement, and design high-impact improvements with relatively light engineering cost.
• Work with our founders to build a 3, 6, and 12-month product roadmap – with an understanding that plans inevitably evolve.
• Establish design best practices, as well as a standardized design aesthetic for the entire app.

If this sounds exciting, please apply to this posting.