Senior Product Designer at happyco

HappyCo is a company where people can grow their careers and work with like minded people, with no egos or politics. HappyCo is values driven and offers a flexible, supportive culture. Join HappyCo and Make Work Happy!  As a Senior Product Designer, you will own and deliver high‑impact web experiences that help customers make better decisions and operate more effectively. You will work end‑to‑end—from problem framing and discovery through to delivery and iteration — operating as part of a product triad alongside a Product Manager and Engineering Lead. Within this triad, you will work closely together to define the team’s roadmap, priorities, and trade‑offs, ensuring alignment with company goals, product strategy, and long‑term vision. You will be expected to represent design through the quality of your thinking and execution, influence outcomes through your work, and contribute meaningfully to shaping how complex, AI‑enabled web products deliver customer and business value. This role is designed for experienced individual contributors who operate with a high degree of autonomy, judgment, and accountability. It suits designers who demonstrate strong product judgment, broad ownership, and comfort working independently, regardless of title or formal authority. We are hiring designers across multiple problem spaces. Final team placement will be based on business needs and strengths demonstrated during the interview process. ___________________________________ Problem Spaces You May Work In Depending on product priorities and your strengths, you may work in one or more of the following areas: Procurement & Sourcing Designing workflows for vendor discovery, pricing comparison, purchasing, approvals, and supplier performance across large multifamily portfolios. Asset & Portfolio Performance Designing dashboards, analytics, and scenario-modeling tools that help operators understand property performance, identify risks and opportunities, and improve returns. These products are information-dense, highly interconnected, and used by multiple roles across an organization. Increasingly, they also incorporate AI-powered interfaces that allow users to proactively query their data, surface insights, and receive recommendations through agentic, conversational, and voice-enabled interactions. Designing clarity, trust, and usability into these systems, across both traditional interfaces and AI-assisted experiences, is core to the role. What You’ll Do | Design Ownership & Impact • Own a defined product area end‑to‑end, from problem framing and discovery through to delivery, measurement, and iteration. • Work backwards from real customer problems, developing a deep understanding of user workflows, constraints, and decision‑making contexts. • Identify and prioritize high‑leverage problems, articulating why they matter for customers, the business, and long‑term product quality. • Translate complex, ambiguous problem spaces into clear hypotheses, design principles, and scalable solutions. • Design, test, and ship high‑quality web experiences, including flows, information architecture, interaction models, and polished UI. • Apply strong systems thinking across workflows, roles, permissions, and data models to ensure solutions scale and remain coherent. • Make deliberate trade‑offs between usability, speed, quality, and technical constraints, and clearly communicate those decisions. • Call out when technically impressive or elegant solutions are misaligned with customer value, usability, or business outcomes. • Measure the impact of your work using qualitative and quantitative signals, validate outcomes with customers where possible, and iterate based on what you learn. What You’ll Do | Customer Obsession & Insight • Run timely, pragmatic research including interviews, usability testing, and lightweight validation loops as part of everyday product work. • Bring real customer context – quotes, workflows, edge cases, and observed behaviours – into product and design discussions. • Synthesize customer insights into clear patterns and themes, not just isolated findings. • Act as an evidence‑backed voice for the customer in cross‑functional conversations. • Create lightweight, repeatable ways for teams to stay close to customers, even when direct access is limited. What You’ll Do | AI & Emerging Interaction Design • Design AI‑assisted experiences that help users proactively explore data, surface insights, and make better decisions. • Shape agentic workflows, conversational interfaces, and voice‑enabled interactions where they meaningfully improve outcomes. • Translate complex AI capabilities into understandable, controllable, and trustworthy user experiences. • Define appropriate guardrails, affordances, and fallbacks so AI‑powered features remain usable and reliable. What You’ll Do | Collaboration & Craft • Partner closely with Product Managers and Engineering Leads to shape problem definitions, scope work, and sequence delivery. • Collaborate with Engineers to ensure designs are feasible, performant, and thoughtfully implemented. • Work with Design Leadership to align on quality, product experience principles, and design standards. • Adhere to, uphold, and actively champion HappyCo’s design system to ensure consistency, quality, and scalability across products. Use the system by default, and work with Design Leadership to evolve components, patterns, or guidance when genuine user needs are not met – treating system gaps as exceptions to be addressed, not reasons to bypass it. • Participate actively in critiques, maintaining a high bar for craft, clarity, accessibility, and usability. • Contribute to documentation, shared patterns, and ways of working that improve team effectiveness. What You Bring | Required • Strong product judgment and a track record of delivering consistently high‑quality design solutions in complex product environments. • Typically 5–8 years of experience designing and shipping web‑based SaaS, B2B, or enterprise products with real users at scale. • A portfolio demonstrating end‑to‑end ownership, including problem framing, exploration, execution, and measurable impact. • Good judgment around when to go deep on research vs when fast validation is sufficient, balancing rigor with pace, and familiarity with using research platforms (e.g. Great Question or similar) to manage recruitment, insights, and follow-up. • Proven ability to work autonomously on ambiguous problems, identify what matters most, and move work forward without excessive direction. • Experience designing data‑dense, information‑rich interfaces such as dashboards, tables, filters, comparison views, or reporting tools. • Strong systems thinking, with the ability to reason across workflows, roles, permissions, and interconnected product surfaces. • Comfort making trade‑offs between quality, speed, and technical constraints, and clearly articulating those decisions. • Fluency with modern design tools and workflows (Figma, prototyping, design systems, documentation). • Clear written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to present work and rationale to cross‑functional partners. • Willingness to collaborate across time zones, including working later in the afternoon or early evening to partner effectively with Australia‑based colleagues. What You Bring | Strongly Valued • Experience designing and shipping AI‑assisted or AI‑augmented product experiences, not just exploratory concepts. • Familiarity with agentic workflows, conversational UX, and emerging patterns for AI‑driven interfaces. • Experience with voice interaction design, multimodal inputs, or non‑traditional UI patterns. • Experience working closely with data, analytics, or platform teams on products where accuracy, trust, and explainability matter. • Background in complex domains such as marketplaces, procurement, operations tooling, analytics platforms, or financial systems. • Demonstrated progression in scope, ownership, and impact across previous roles. • Comfort with design engineering techniques, including working close to code, understanding front‑end architectures, or prototyping with code where it improves speed, fidelity, or collaboration. • Hands‑on use of AI‑driven design tools (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, Lovable, Figma Make, or similar) to accelerate thinking, prototyping, or workflow efficiency. Why Join HappyCo? • Make an Impact: Your work will reach millions of residents and thousands of property teams. • Culture of Craft: We care deeply about design quality, user impact, and creative exploration. • High Autonomy, High Support: You’ll be trusted to lead and supported to grow, with mentorship when you want it. • Flexibility & Work-Life Balance: We offer hybrid and remote-friendly policies with flexible hours. • Growth & Learning: Access to training, mentorship, and opportunities to grow your skills. About HappyCo Founded in 2011, HappyCo (happy.co) builds mobile and cloud solutions to enable real-time property data. Our flagship product suite 'Happy Property’ has more than 5 million units on its platform. We’re everyday people with a shared purpose — improving the lives of others. Our team is made up of thinkers, talkers, planners, makers, builders and everything in between. Together, we’re turning our passions into happier communities!  When customers use our software, their communities get stronger. Our tools empower everyone in multifamily property management to improve their operations and maximize returns, which means they’re building better experiences for their residents. Learn more about our Product Vision here! Our HappyCo Culture & Values HappyCo strives to build better communities. So naturally, we are dedicated to making our own community an enjoyable place that lets us do our best work. We’re devoted to building an inclusive, supportive culture that empowers each HappyCo’er to succeed and grow. To learn more about our culture, check out our Glassdoor page and our careers page!  HappyCo’s culture is driven by our core values of Make Happiness, Better Together, Get Good Sh*t Done, Customer Obsessed and Kaizen - sounds great, right, but what does this mean for you?  We believe in supporting people to do their best work and thrive, and building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive company is core to our mission. Our goal is to ensure that HappyCo upholds an inclusive environment where all people feel that they are equally respected and valued, whether they are applying for an open position or working at the company. We welcome applicants of any educational background, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, citizenship, socioeconomic status, disability, and veteran status. HappyCo is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. A note to Recruitment Agencies: Please don’t reach out to us about our roles -- we’ve got it covered. We don’t accept unsolicited agency resumes and HappyCo is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes