Enterprise Product Designer

Substack is doing something new. If it works, it will be consequential for us and for the world at large, but it’s going to take a lot of doing. We can get into what this is, exactly, and especially how it will work, but we already know, to some extent, what we’re looking for.

• An owner
• Someone full-stack: technical, scrappy, wide-ranging in terms of what they can do; but capable of excellent, polished design work that takes many dynamics into account
• Someone determined to win, a “do whatever it takes” type

This new thing is going to be pursued by a company-in-a-company. You’ll be the design function for this company, and also the design consultant for the writers (and other creatives) it serves. You’ll need to work with them effectively, while being able to help them reason about product and platform possibilities within the space. It’ll be highly useful if you can build things, or at least work in the front-end somewhat effectively.

Beyond this, it’s a regular Substack Product Design role, the description of which follows:

Experienced designers know that business realities shape the possibility spaces of product strategy. If “what works” for a product or platform is defined ultimately by “what sells more ads at better prices,” designers may achieve a lovely user interface or ideal typography, but everything will be in service of producing the same strange, often-nightmarish dynamics we all know from the many scaled platforms of the past decade.

Substack does not have silver bullets for the problems of human nature and we will not avoid all of the costs of creating scaled platforms. But we do have a different model, one in which we make money only when writers, musicians, artists, journalists, cooks, students, and people of all kinds earn money from audiences who value them enough to consistently pay them. Crucially, in this model, all scales are reduced: one needs thousands, not millions, of fans, and this difference alone changes the dynamics of the platform, and thus what’s possible with e.g. product architecture. As fundamental, though, is the level of trust and interest involved in paid subscriptions. “What works” for Substack is what leads people to make long-term and real investments in independent creators of all kinds, and we hope this will lead to improved outcomes in aggregate across many types of features.

If you’re interested in working on this model, we’d love to chat! Design at Substack is somewhat wild, and we’re looking for rigorous, robust, high-output designers who are comfortable with the pros and cons of startup life. We are not a “best practices” shop; we have little process; we work closely with executives and other functions and we’re not territorial or precious. But we get to shape the development of the most promising platform for creators, we have a lovely and weird little team, and we have a lot of fun in our quite-free and friendly company. If this sounds compelling, hit us up!

Substack’s compensation package includes a market-competitive salary, equity for all full-time roles, and exceptional benefits. Our cash compensation salary range for this role is $150,000 – $215,000. Multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, determine final offer amounts and may vary from the amounts listed above.
Responsibilities

• Rapidly build context about disparate product areas, community dynamics, and industry norms in any domains, from print media to podcasting to online social systems
• Identify high-leverage opportunities for your team and help make their pursuit practicable through rigorous path-conception, batch-sizing, staging, and go to market planning
• Design beautiful, usable, scalable interfaces and flows for a wide range of product zones (from profiles to CRM / analytics, publication aesthetics to moderation systems, email layouts to interactive content actions, and so much more)
• Think holistically about the second-order effects on Substack as a product system; balance user groups, weigh trade-offs, and pragmatically find solutions which achieve the best outcomes possible given various constraints
• Find ways to help creators and audiences build long-lasting, rewarding, and healthy relationships; empower audience members to become contributors and creators
• Help diversify the kinds of creators Substack supports, through novel media type support, alternative reader experiences, supporting outreach programs, and more
• Shape the culture and processes of Design at Substack

Requirements

• All product design applications must link to or include a portfolio. This portfolio needn’t be overly polished, although excellently presented work might stand out; our focus will above all be on whether you’ve demonstrated the capacity to craft design solutions in relevant or related product areas
• 2 years of experience designing software; we’re especially keen to see experience with social networks; content networks; or content systems or products of various kinds; but any experience building software interfaces applies (note: if you do not have this experience but believe you can hit the ground running, shipping high quality software immediately, feel free to apply)
• High degree of competence with Figma.
• High tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. Substack is still becoming a company, and much remains up for debate; everything from cycle plans to organizational structure to top-line strategy can change —and will— so a certain degree of adventurousness or heartiness is required, as it can all get rather messy!
• Interest in both independence and collaboration. Sometimes, we must be team players; at other times, we must strike out to explore and find new areas of opportunity. You should be at least comfortable with both modes of operation.

Preferences

• Preference for technical abilities. While it’s not a requirement, we’ll be very excited to see candidates who can code. Specifically, we highly value strong front-end skills, experience making and deploying sites end to end, and experience with TypeScript and React. We’re also of course very keen on candidates with SwiftUI capabilities. Current product designers with these skills use them often and to great effect, but we also appreciate that technical designers are “into software” as a whole.
• Preference for SF Bay Area based. Living near our San Francisco HQ means being able to work directly with the CEO and others in-office, so it’s preferred. But most of us —including our Head of Design— are fully remote, and remote candidates shouldn’t feel discouraged from applying.