Last updated: October 15, 2026
By Devin Hornick, Co-Founder and Partner, KORE1
A product designer job description should name the product the hire will own, the metric they share with a product manager, the platforms they ship on, and a base range, about $100,000 to $175,000 for mid to senior in 2026. Everything else on the page is supporting detail. Candidates read those four lines first and decide in under a minute.
The posting I want to talk about went up last winter on a Monday. A payments company in the Flatiron District, about 220 people, one design lead and two designers for 31 engineers. The title read “Product Designer / Senior Product Designer.” One range for both levels, $120,000 to $190,000. Eleven bullets. The word “UI/UX” appeared three times.
By Friday it had 640 applicants.
The design lead read the first hundred over a weekend and found four she wanted to talk to. Two of them were web-only. The job, it turned out, was mostly the merchant app on iOS and Android, which the posting never mentioned. Nobody had written it down because everybody inside the building already knew.
And the range was a problem of its own. New York wants a separate range for each level when one posting covers two. So the posting was out of step with state law from the day it went up, and nobody inside knew.
The fix took two passes and ended with two postings instead of one. The rest of this page is what changed, plus a template you can copy. If you’re still deciding whether to bring in outside help on the search itself, our product designer staffing team screens on the same things this template asks candidates to show, so read it either way.
Disclosure, since I’m a partner here. We get paid if you hire a person we introduced. The template costs nothing and needs no recruiter attached. Use it, ignore us, fine.
What a Product Designer Posting Owes Candidates That a UX Posting Doesn’t
A product designer owns a piece of software from the problem statement to the number it moves after launch, across research, flows, interface, and the design system. The posting should describe that ownership in concrete terms. Generic duty lists describe a UX or UI role instead.
We already published a UX designer job description with the research, prototyping, and portfolio guidance that both roles share. I won’t repeat it. Read that one if your seat is research-heavy and light on business outcomes. If you’re still unsure which title you’re hiring for, Gregg’s guide to hiring a product designer walks the four-way split between product, UX, UI, and industrial design.
This page is about the lines that only a product designer posting needs. There are five of them.
| Line in the posting | Typical UX designer posting | Product designer posting |
|---|---|---|
| Outcome | Improve usability of a flow | A named metric, its current value, and the PM who shares it |
| Surface | “Web and mobile” | Web, iOS, Android, or admin tools, with the design system each one uses |
| Team shape | Reports to a design lead | Designers per engineer, plus whether a researcher exists |
| Time split | Rarely stated | A rough discovery-to-delivery percentage |
| Accessibility | “Knowledge of WCAG” | The standard you ship to and the markets that require it |
Name the Number You’ll Share With a PM
Every strong product designer I’ve talked to in the last two years asks some version of the same question in the first call. What does this team get measured on? They’re asking whether design has a seat at the table, or just a ticket queue.
So put the number in the posting. Not a vague “drive engagement.” A metric, where it sits today, and who else owns it. “Merchant activation within 14 days of signup is 41 percent. You’ll share that number with our payments PM, Dana, and the onboarding engineering team.” That sentence filters harder than any bullet about “strategic thinking,” because the designers who’ve never been measured on anything will feel the pressure of it and move on. Good. The ones who have will lean in.
Revealing a metric worries some legal teams. Fine. Describe it without the value. “Activation inside two weeks, which is below where we want it” still tells the candidate what the job is.
Then say how many engineers this designer supports. One designer for six engineers is a job. One designer for fifteen is a different job, mostly triage, and the people who are good at it are not always the people who are good at discovery. Flatiron’s first posting hid a three-designers-for-31-engineers ratio behind the phrase “fast-paced.” Candidates figured it out in the second interview, and two dropped.
Say Which Screens, on Which Platforms
“Web and mobile” is the single most common phrase I see in these postings. It tells a candidate almost nothing.
Native platforms moved in 2025. Apple introduced Liquid Glass on June 9, 2025, a see-through material it carried across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26. Apple’s own Human Interface Guidelines on materials describe it as a dynamic layer for controls and navigation that sits over content. Google went the other direction the same spring with Material 3 Expressive, which it calls the most researched update to its design system, built on 46 studies and more than 18,000 participants. Two platform vendors, two very different visual languages, one design team expected to ship both.
Someone with four years inside a React web app with a custom design system can absolutely learn SwiftUI conventions. It takes a quarter, maybe two. If your roadmap can’t absorb that, the posting has to say so up front.
| Surface | What to write in the posting | Who it filters out |
|---|---|---|
| Customer web app | Framework (React, Vue, Angular), the design system name, whether Figma variables map to code tokens | Designers who’ve only worked in marketing sites |
| iOS app | SwiftUI or UIKit, whether you’ve adopted Liquid Glass yet, minimum iOS version supported | Web designers who’d draw an Android tab bar on an iPhone |
| Android app | Jetpack Compose or legacy views, Material 3 or a custom theme | Designers who treat Android as “the iOS file, resized” |
| Admin and internal tools | Who uses it (support agents, warehouse leads, underwriters) and how many hours a day | Portfolio-first designers who want consumer polish work |
| Design system | Mature and maintained, half-built, or nonexistent. Who owns it. | Builders who’ll be bored inside a finished one, and the reverse |
Out in Irvine, a medical device company learned this one the hard way in 2024. Their patient app was iOS-first, with maybe 70 percent of active users on iPhone. The posting said “mobile experience.” They hired a talented web designer at $148,000, and she spent her first ten weeks relearning navigation patterns her engineers already knew. She stayed. She’s good now. But that was a quarter of roadmap they’d budgeted for the redesign itself.
Put a Percentage on Discovery
Here’s a line almost nobody writes. “About 30 percent of your week goes to discovery: customer calls, usability sessions, sorting support tickets. The rest is design and delivery.”
Nobody writes it. I’m not sure why.
Every product designer reading your posting wants to know one thing before the salary, which is whether they get to figure out what to build or just get handed tickets with a Figma link attached. Thirty percent answers it. So does ten, honestly. What hurts you is silence. The designer who expects 60 percent discovery and gets 10 is gone inside a year, and they’ll say so on the way out. I heard that exact complaint from candidates leaving three different companies this year. Same words, almost. Kind of eerie.
A few things to state alongside the percentage.
- Whether you have a dedicated UX researcher. If not, say the designer runs their own sessions, and roughly how many a quarter.
- Who talks to customers. Some companies route every call through sales. Write that down if it’s true.
- The analytics tool (Amplitude, Mixpanel, Heap, a home-grown dashboard) and whether designers get their own login. You’d be surprised how often they don’t.
- The handoff. Figma Dev Mode, annotated specs, or a designer sitting in sprint review.
None of it needs a paragraph. Four lines. Five, tops.
Accessibility Now Decides Where You Can Sell
Our UX template covers the U.S. side of this, including the 2024 ADA Title II rule for public entities. The product designer posting has a newer reason to be specific, and it comes from Europe.
The European Accessibility Act, Directive (EU) 2019/882, applies to covered products placed on the market after June 28, 2025, and to services such as consumer banking and e-commerce. The directive defines e-commerce as services delivered at a distance “through websites and mobile device-based services.” Microenterprises providing services are exempt. Pretty much everyone else selling to EU consumers isn’t, and that includes a lot of American companies that assumed the law was somebody else’s problem.
I talked with a Tampa travel-booking company in March. Roughly a fifth of their bookings come from Germany and the Netherlands. Their product designer posting said “familiarity with accessibility best practices.” That sentence pulls everyone, which means it filters no one. We rewrote it to “Our booking flow must meet WCAG 2.2 AA because we sell to EU consumers under the European Accessibility Act. You’ll own accessibility annotations on every handoff.” Fewer applicants. Better ones. The designer they hired had shipped a Danish bank’s mobile onboarding.
If you don’t sell in the EU and you aren’t a public entity, you can still write the standard you ship to. It costs nothing to name it.
Pay, and Why New York Wants the Description Itself
The bands below come from our product designer salary guide, which blends six aggregators with searches our recruiters have closed. The federal anchor is lower because it covers a broader job family. The Bureau of Labor Statistics files most of these jobs under web and digital interface designers, an occupation with 113,330 jobs in May 2025, a $104,000 median, and a 90th percentile of $201,550.
| Level | Base range (U.S., 2026) | What the posting should say they own |
|---|---|---|
| Mid-level | $100,000 to $135,000 | One feature area, research to ship |
| Senior | $135,000 to $175,000 | A product surface and the metric attached to it |
| Staff / Lead | $170,000 to $210,000 | The design system and standards across teams |
New York is where most of the postings I mark up are headed, so start there. Under New York Labor Law Section 194-b, employers with four or more employees must post a pay range on every advertised job, promotion, or transfer performed at least partly in the state. That includes remote roles reporting to a New York supervisor or office, even when the designer works from home in New Jersey or Florida. Postings by a recruiter or job board on your behalf count too.
Three details in the Department of Labor’s guidance trip up design postings specifically.
The job description itself is required. The fact sheet says postings must contain a job description when one is available, and an employer has to create one unless the title clearly conveys the duties. The example the state gives is dishwasher. “Product designer” is not dishwasher. Ask five companies what it means and you’ll get five answers, which is the entire reason this page exists.
Separate levels need separate ranges. A posting for multiple opportunities at different seniority levels must carry a range for each. So the Flatiron company’s “Product Designer / Senior Product Designer, $120K to $190K” needed two lines. We split it into two postings instead, $118,000 to $140,000 and $150,000 to $182,000, because the candidate pools barely overlap anyway.
The range can’t be open-ended and can’t include benefits. “$150K+” is out. So is folding insurance, paid leave, or 401(k) matching into the number. List those separately, along with equity, and honestly, do list them. Candidates comparing two senior offers in Manhattan look at the equity line before they look at the base.
Not sure your band holds up in Austin or Minneapolis? Price that city in our salary benchmark assistant first.
Product Designer Job Description Template
Copy this and fill in every bracket. Lines tagged “Internal” are for you only. Delete those lines before the posting goes anywhere, your own careers page included.
Job Title
[Senior] Product Designer, [product or surface, e.g. Merchant Mobile App] [Internal: one level per posting. In New York, a posting covering two levels needs two ranges. If the role is physical goods and CAD, the title is industrial designer, a different occupation entirely.]
The Product and the Number
You’ll own the design of [product or surface], used by [who, how many, how often]. Together with [PM name or title] and the [team name] engineers, you’re accountable for [metric], which is [current value or “below where we want it”] today.
Where It Ships
[Web app in React / iOS app in SwiftUI / Android app in Jetpack Compose / internal admin tool]. Our design system is [name], and it’s [mature and maintained by a dedicated team / half-built and needs an owner / not started]. We [have / haven’t] adopted [Liquid Glass / Material 3 Expressive]. We ship to WCAG [2.2 AA] because [we sell to EU consumers / it’s our standard].
Who You Work With
You’ll report to [title]. The design team is [N] people supporting about [N] engineers. [We have / don’t have] a dedicated UX researcher. You’ll work most closely with [titles], and you’ll talk to customers through [direct calls / sales-led calls / support ticket reviews].
How the Week Splits
About [N] percent discovery: customer calls, usability sessions, reading [analytics tool] data you’ll have your own login for. The rest is design, critique, and working with engineers through [Figma Dev Mode / annotated specs / sprint reviews].
Your First Six Months
- By month two, run [N] sessions with real [users] and write up what you found for the team
- By month four, ship [the specific flow or feature], designed for [platforms]
- By month six, show what happened to [metric] and what you’d change next
What We’re Looking For
- [3 to 5 / 5 to 8] years designing software products that shipped, with at least one you can tie to a measurable result
- Work on [iOS / Android / complex web apps] in production, not only concepts
- Comfort with Figma components, variables, and auto layout inside a shared library
- Experience running your own usability sessions and acting on what they showed
- Working knowledge of WCAG 2.2 AA, including contrast, focus order, and screen reader behavior
- You can explain a tradeoff to an engineering lead and a VP in the same afternoon, in different words
Not Required
- A design degree
- Production coding ability
- Experience in [our industry], if you’ve worked on products with similar complexity
How to Show Us Your Work
Send one or two case studies, not a full portfolio. If your best work is under NDA, a password-protected link or a 20-minute walkthrough with the details blurred is fine. We’ll ask about decisions and tradeoffs, not polish.
Pay, Benefits, and Location
Base pay is $[minimum] to $[maximum] a year[, with [stock options / RSUs] on a [N]-year schedule]. Benefits include [health plan, dental, vision, retirement match, paid time off]. This role is [on site at our [city] office [N] days per week / remote within [time zones]]. [Internal: in New York the range must be a real minimum and maximum you’d pay in good faith, no “+” ranges, no benefits folded into the number. Remote roles reporting to a New York manager are covered.]
Six Things Hiring Managers Ask Before Posting It
Our company is in New York but the designer will be remote. Do we still post a range?
Yes, if the designer reports to a supervisor, office, or worksite in New York, because the state’s pay transparency law covers remote roles that report into the state regardless of where the employee lives.
The exception is narrow. Occasional trips to New York for a meeting or a conference don’t make a job “performed in” the state by themselves. A designer who reports to a manager in your Hudson Yards office does.
Can one posting cover both product designer and senior product designer?
It can, but in New York it needs a separate range for each level, and in practice two postings work better because the candidate pools and the work you’d describe barely overlap.
A mid-level designer reads “own the merchant onboarding redesign.” A senior reads “own the activation number across onboarding and first payment.” Different sentences. Different people.
Should the posting list AI tools?
Only the ones your team actually uses and allows with customer data, because a long list of AI tools reads as a trend checklist and tells candidates nothing about the job.
If your company bans uploading customer screenshots to outside AI tools, say that. Designers who’ve worked in banking or healthcare will appreciate it. The ones who haven’t need to know.
Is “UI/UX designer” an acceptable title?
Avoid it. The slash tells experienced candidates the team hasn’t decided what the role is, and it pulls a mixed pool of visual designers and researchers who are each strong in one half.
Pick product designer if the seat owns an outcome, UX designer if it’s research-led, UI designer if the problem is already solved and needs building well.
How long should a product designer posting be?
Six hundred to nine hundred words is plenty, roughly what the template above produces once the brackets are filled, because every extra bullet past that dilutes the four lines candidates actually read.
Flatiron’s rewrite gained a metric, a platform line, a discovery percentage, and a second range, and still came out shorter. Seven bullets went. Nobody asked about them.
What should we ask candidates to send if their work is under NDA?
Ask for a walkthrough instead of files, either a password-protected case study or a short call where they talk through decisions with sensitive details blurred, since most strong product designers can’t share their best work publicly.
Requiring a public portfolio quietly screens out people from fintech, health tech, and enterprise software. That’s a lot of the pool. When the shortlist is ready, our product designer interview questions cover what to ask in the panel itself.
Post It Once the Number Is Written Down
Flatiron filled both seats. Took seven weeks.
The senior hire started in April, picked up the merchant app on iOS and Android, sat in on something like forty merchant calls in her first two months, and by August had 14-day activation at 47 percent, up from 41, which the PM credits half to her and half to a pricing change. Probably fair. The mid-level designer came from a regional bank’s mobile team in Charlotte. Nobody saw that coming. Not from the first posting, anyway.
Can’t write the metric sentence yet? Then don’t post. Have that conversation first, and I’m glad to be in it. KORE1 has been filling seats since 2005, and our digital and creative staffing desk covers 30-plus metros. Our typical fill takes 17 days. Twelve months out, our direct-hire retention sits at 92 percent. Whether you want a contract designer for a redesign or a permanent hire to own the product, you can send us your draft posting and we’ll mark it up on the first call.
