Product Designer

WHY WE’RE LOOKING FOR YOU:

Today, nearly every company in the world runs on custom internal software: Gartner estimates that up to 50% of all code is written for internal usage. This is the mission-critical software that runs business workflows: refunding orders, underwriting loans, moderating content, managing marketplaces, rolling out new features, onboarding employees, analyzing transactions, providing customer support…the list is nearly endless. For most companies, building and maintaining all of these tools demands a lot of engineering time—scarce, expensive resources better put to use on customer-facing products.

At Retool, we’re designing a new type of development environment that makes it dramatically faster and easier to build all of this internal software. Retool unifies the ease of visual programming with the power of code, while abstracting away the tedious and repetitive tasks of development. We believe that the future of software development lies in being a force multiplier for developers and technical builders, helping them move considerably faster and build a lot more software.

ABOUT THE TEAM:

Retool designers make decisions that will affect millions of people, from the developers creating software to the employees who operate it every day. Instead of designing just one product, we’re effectively designing unique software products for thousands of companies across many different verticals.

This also presents a unique design challenge. Because it’s possible to build nearly anything in Retool, we don’t have absolute control over how our users experience the product. We’re constantly seeking just the right balance between convention and configuration, between technical expressiveness and conceptual simplicity.

As a Product Designer, you’ll be joining an experienced, tight-knit, and collaborative group from diverse backgrounds who love combining research, data insights, and peer feedback into a user-centered design process. While we work very closely with our product teams, we’re intentional about preserving space for designers to learn and work alongside each other.

WHAT YOU’LL DO:

• Own and drive the complete product design lifecycle of major features
• Partner with product, engineering, success, sales, and marketing to understand business objectives and uncover customer insights
• Perform user research to identify problems and validate solutions
• Produce the artifacts needed—specs, sketches, wireframes, mockups, prototypes, or code—to take UI ideas from conception to production
• Participate in design reviews and share work regularly with designers, cross-functional teams, leadership, and the company
• Contribute to Retool’s design system and component library
• Help establish design team processes and uphold high standards for design and product quality

WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON:

• Adoption—Accelerate the adoption of Retool by shortening time-to-value, inspiring new customers, and encouraging network effects
• App experience—Design the core desktop building experience for Retool, from drag-and-drop UI building to writing queries and debugging apps
• Design systems—Design the system that defines Retool and our customers’ apps
• Developer toolchain—Connect and improve on the traditional software development stack of environments, source control, documentation, testing, and release management
• Hub—Help our largest customers scale with Retool as a unified, integrated platform, from permissions management to observability and product analytics
• Grid—Empower customers to immediately visualize their own databases and create new databases within Retool to power their apps
• Mobile—Extend desktop Retool to support mobile-first workforces that rely on native mobile capabilities
• Workflows—Enable customers to build and execute human-in-the-loop business processes that bring together backend automation with Retool’s frontend UI

THE SKILLSET YOU'LL BRING:

• Have a strong portfolio demonstrating a generalist design skills and experience driving the product design lifecycle from end-to-end
• Are excited about breaking down technically complex problems into abstractions, finding a balance between ease of use, learnability, and power
• Love thinking systematically about hard problems with a lot of tradeoffs—then going deep on getting the details right through rapid, continual iteration
• Are customer-obsessed and excited to spend time with users
• Have experience designing developer-centric products, creative software, and/or enterprise internal tools
• Are comfortable with basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. (Bonus points if you have some working knowledge of SQL, databases, or APIs!)
• Are an excellent communicator (and consider writing to be a fundamental design skill)
• Thrive in ambiguity, can independently prioritize work based on user needs and business goals, and take responsibility to drive product ideas forward
• Are inspired to radically rethink how software is built