Director of Product Design (AI Builder)

Role overview

Director of Product Design (AI Builder) at Babylist, leading the design and experience for the Registry product. You’ll own the UX, vision, KPIs, and interface quality, translating company goals into clear priorities and ensuring design standards at Babylist.

Key missions

• Own the user experience, product vision, KPIs, and quality bar for the Registry.
• Translate business objectives into clear priorities; take calculated risks to drive meaningful improvements.
• Lead and develop a team of 3–4 product designers; set quality standards and an operating model for design.
• Advocate for customers’ long-term needs and build an AI-first, craft-obsessed design culture.

Responsibilities / what you’ll do

• Set product and design direction: craft standards, operating model, and experience consistency across the Babylist ecosystem.
• Run and leverage generative and evaluative research to produce actionable insights.
• Synthesize complex inputs, challenge assumptions, and communicate design rationale with clarity.
• Build and maintain design team systems/rituals/processes that enable execution with quality (not bureaucracy).
• Use AI tools to prototype, explore, and iterate quickly, while staying close to craft and shipping.
• Measure outcomes and hold self/org accountable to meaningful metric movement.

Requirements (profile)

• Industry-aware and strong with interaction patterns; fluent in modern product design and design-system conventions.
• Human- and data-centered approach to research, with strong qualitative and quantitative evidence and persuasive communication.
• Clear, critical thinker who can stress-test assumptions and surface misalignment early.
• Strong people leadership: hiring, coaching, feedback, and performance management.
• Strategic visionary who aligns user needs and business priorities into an inspirational, actionable future vision.
• Systems thinking across end-to-end flows and the design system.
• Operational excellence: chooses processes that enable delivery.
• AI-native practitioner-leader who can both leverage AI tools and demonstrate hands-on craft/shipping capability.
• Adaptable and action-biased; comfortable jumping across boundaries.
• Excited to help shape an AI transformation in product design.

Nice to have

• Evidence of building AI-first design practices and/or instrumenting design outcomes with metrics.