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Role details for Founding Product Designer
The person
- You see problems beyond the surface and immediately start looking for a way through, because to you, friction means opportunity.
- Other people may experience you as intense. You question defaults, debate solutions, and struggle to “just go with the flow” when something feels wrong. That is not a personality bug here. That is the raw material of good product judgment.
- You define the real problems. You get excited when you find a solution hiding in plain sight; you believe in understanding the user deeply and are willing to keep pushing.
- You do not need to be a traditional engineer. You do need to be dangerous with modern tools. You use AI, taste, judgment, and persistence to turn ideas into working product.
What you will own
- You will own the lived experience of Classiqo.
- That means staying close to users in a high-trust environment, understanding what professors and students actually struggle with, and turning that into product that feels simple, useful, and hard to live without.
- You will shape the user experience, the data we capture, and the flywheel that makes Classiqo a better companion the more people use it.
- This may involve using top-tier AI models and a serious token budget to become full-stack enough to execute your own ideas across Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Supabase, Postgres, and Vercel.
What you will work on
- Deep user discovery with professors and students
- Professor workflows for generation, review, editing, and approval
- Student practice loops tied to course-specific reasoning
- Product experiments from demos, feedback, and classroom pain
- Full-stack prototypes and production features using the Classiqo stack
- Eloquent, minimalist product surfaces backed by research and market truth
You will be a fit if you can
- Use AI tools as a daily part of your product workflow: research synthesis, user-interview analysis, prototyping, writing specs, exploring UI options, and turning vague ideas into testable product directions.
- Stay close to users and translate messy feedback from professors and students into clear product decisions.
- Independently move from problem discovery to product flow, prototype, PRD, acceptance criteria, and shipped experience.
- Design simple product surfaces for complex workflows without hiding the underlying logic.
- Use tools like Figma, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Lovable, Framer, or React prototypes to make ideas tangible quickly.
- Think in data and product loops: what we capture, what the user gives us, what improves with repeated use, and what makes the product harder to leave.
- Work with engineers closely enough to understand implementation tradeoffs, edge cases, failure states, loading states, and data constraints.
- Judge product quality by whether users come back, not by whether the interface looks polished.
- Be willing to test ugly early versions if they reveal real user truth.
- Write clearly: PRDs, user stories, experiment notes, feedback summaries, and product decisions.
- Preferred experience
- Experience designing or building workflow-heavy SaaS products.
- Experience with education, assessment, tutoring, productivity, collaboration, or B2B tools.
- Ability to prototype in React / Next.js / no-code / AI coding tools.
- Experience running user interviews and turning them into product decisions.
- Experience designing for expert users, not just consumer onboarding.
- Comfort with analytics, event tracking, retention, and activation loops.
- Bonus experience
- Experience with professor / student / university workflows.
- Experience designing AI-assisted products where output needs review, correction, and trust.
- Experience using AI to materially increase product design speed and depth.