Head of Product Design

n8n sits at one of the most interesting UX problems in software right now: more than 80% of workflows built on n8n today involve AI agents, and the platform is in the middle of a deliberate expansion from deeply technical developers toward a broader set of builders. This is a foundational hire with a real mandate and direct exec partnership.

What you'll do

• Set a clear, consistent quality bar that the team can orient around and build toward, so great work becomes the natural output of how we design together.
• Shape product strategy, not just respond to it. Bring design thinking into roadmap conversations and help surface user problems before they become someone else's brief.
• Lead a team of around 14 designers today: 2 Design Leads each working with ~6 ICs, plus Design Engineering and UX Research.
• Establish a pragmatic, continuous research practice from the ground up. Make customer insight, product data, and community feedback a live input to product decisions.
• Help lead n8n's expansion toward a broader, less technical audience, a deliberate and exciting strategic shift that design should be leading.
• Champion practical AI adoption inside the design org, from prototyping and research synthesis to design QA and workflow efficiency.

What you'll need

• You have managed managers, coached senior designers, and built design teams that improve both craft and business outcomes.
• You have led design across complex or developer-facing products where UX quality depends on deep product understanding.
• You are a quality bar, not just someone who appreciates quality. You can identify great work, explain why it's great, and hold the line on standards.
• You have made design a co-equal in product conversations, not a downstream function. You know how to bring people with you and drive decisions.
• You understand the AI, automation, or adjacent tooling landscape and can turn emerging patterns into usable, trustworthy product experiences.
• You know how to build research into product development so insight becomes part of how teams make decisions.
• You can design team structures, define career paths, and handle difficult performance conversations with clarity.

Nice to have

• You have worked on open-source, fair-code, community-led, or builder-driven products and understand what it means to design for a community that has strong opinions.
• You have enough front-end or design engineering fluency to partner deeply on design system adoption and implementation quality.
• You have built design rituals, critique, QA, and collaboration practices that work across distributed teams and time zones.
• You have worked on activation, onboarding, templates, time-to-value, or product-led growth surfaces.