Head of Product Design

Kindred is a members-only home swapping platform that enables people to travel through a trusted community of home exchanges. The company is seeking a Head of Product Design to lead the product design team, own the end-to-end member experience across web and mobile, and shape product strategy. The role combines hands-on design leadership, team development, cross-functional collaboration, and advancing AI-native design practices.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, coach, and grow a cross-disciplinary design team spanning product design, research, and content/UX writing
• Run the rituals, feedback culture, and career paths that make this a team people do their best work on
• Set the design vision and strategy for Kindred, and align it tightly with company strategy as a key thought partner to product, engineering, marketing and operations
• Champion member-centric thinking across the company, grounding decisions in both qualitative insight and quantitative data
• Lean into strategic growth design: activation, conversion, and the loops that turn members into evangelists
• Own the quality bar for the member experience, from big swings on new surfaces to the fit-and-finish details that make Kindred a design-forward and trusted platform
• Build and scale the systems that let great design ship fast — design systems, tooling, rituals, and process that hold up as the team grows
• Lead an AI-native design practice: set the standard for how the team uses AI across prototyping, research synthesis, and production, and evolve the workflow as the tools do
• Partner deeply with marketing and brand to ensure product and brand operate as one system, from acquisition through the in-product experience

Requirements:

• Have 12+ years in product design, including 5+ years leading and managing design teams
• Have managed cross-functionally across product design, research, and content/writing, and know how to make those disciplines stronger together
• Have a proven track record partnering with marketing and brand
• Have deep experience with design systems: building them, scaling them, and using them to raise both quality and velocity
• Have designed for trust between people (marketplaces, communities, or products where members take real-world leaps of faith)
• Are AI-native and you have a point of view on how AI changes what a design team is and how it works
• Are a strong operator: you run tight rituals, give sharp feedback, and build teams people want to stay on
• Are a true player-coach, you still love the craft, and you ship work yourself when it counts
• Have been the most senior design leader at a company, owning the function end-to-end (Head of Design, Director+, or equivalent)
• You have experience with marketplace or community-driven consumer products
• You've built or led both consumer and brand/marketing design work
• You've shipped production features or internal tools built primarily with AI (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, or similar)
• You've taken products from 0→1 and from 1→10 and know how the playbooks differ