Director, Product Design (AI Builder)

Registry is the heart of Babylist – how we help growing families feel prepared during one of life's most consequential transitions, and the acquisition and commercial engine powering the rest of our business.

We're hiring a design leader to own it.

This role is the durable design and experience owner for Registry, accountable for the UX, vision, KPIs, and quality bar that define how it feels. You translate company goals into clear priorities so your org always knows what to work on and why. You take bold bets, pushing past safe incrementalism to make the case for step-function improvements — advocating for customers' long-term needs while ensuring business impact. You epitomize being a builder: getting into the work, codebase, and data directly rather than delegating, standing up prototypes and contributing to production-quality interfaces when that's fastest. You partner with engineers, PMs, and analysts as peer-builders, setting the standard for what an AI-native designer creates. You shape the craft standards and operating model that define Design at Babylist, leading the team's transition to AI-native product development at scale.

Reports to the VP, Head of Product Design and Research; sits on the Consumer Tech Leadership team; leads 3–4 product designers.

• Strategic visionary. You combine user needs, business priorities, and sharp product and design sense into an inspirational vision that articulates the future, allowing the org to work backward with clarity and strategic focus. 
• Craft and experience obsessed. You care deeply about how things feel, not just how they function. You polish the details like transitions, motion, and accessibility. You hold a high bar for delight and have a portfolio of shipped consumer product work across web and native mobile that demonstrates this.
• Systems thinker. You see the full picture. You think about how a single interaction fits into a broader experience, how Registry flows connect across the Babylist ecosystem, and how the design system enables all of it. 
• AI-native practitioner-leader. You use AI tools to prototype, explore, and iterate at speed. You stay close to the craft, review work at depth, and can build when building is the fastest path to impact. You lead from a place of real craft knowledge and hands-on understanding of what it takes to ship.
• Human-and-data-centered. You know how to leverage (and plan and run) generative and evaluative research to unlock actionable insights that guide product decisions. You bring concrete qualitative and quantitative evidence into design decisions and share clear, persuasive design rationale via concise and impactful communication.
• Industry aware and pattern fluent. You stay current with modern product design to borrow what's proven and challenge what's stale. You know the interaction patterns, design system conventions, and digital product best practices that have become table stakes, and when to apply them or evolve them.
• Clear and critical thinker. You cut through complexity with thoughtful synthesis of competing inputs, stress-testing assumptions, and communicate your point of view with extreme clarity. You don't mistake collaboration for consensus and encourage productive conflict, preferring to surface misalignment early to accelerate and de-risk decisions.
• Outcome owner. You don't celebrate shipping, you own impact. You instrument your own work, track whether it's moving the right metrics, and hold yourself and your org accountable for meaningful results. 
• People leader. You hire, develop, retain, and inspire a team of designers. You give direct, honest feedback, manage performance with care and clarity, and create an environment where designers do their best work. 
• Operational leader. You build and maintain the systems, rituals, and processes that allow your team to execute with quality and consistency. You know the difference between process that enables and process that burdens, and you make deliberate choices about both.
• Adaptable to change. You select for change, not against it. You jump in where needed, working across team boundaries without waiting for permission. You are humble, low-ego, and biased toward action. You bring curiosity to ambiguity, not anxiety.
• Excited about the AI transformation. You believe this is the most interesting moment in modern design careers, and you want to help shape what an AI-first design organization looks like both at Babylist and as a category.

• Own the Registry experience end-to-end. Think holistically about user flows, brand expression, information architecture, and interaction patterns across the full Babylist cross-platform ecosystem. You are accountable for the quality and outcomes of everything your team ships.
• Lead with equal parts vision, strategy, and execution. Connect design vision to company strategy and business goals. Articulate where the Registry experience should be in 12-18 months and, together with your PM and Engineering peers, set strategy by defining the sequence of bets that get us there while earning organizational alignment. 
• Define excellence. Set the bar for quality, delight, and product excellence by demonstrating and teaching the organization what great looks and feels like. Eschew perfection for learning that propels the product toward your high bar.
• Stay deeply connected to users and the work. Plan and execute research to ground design decisions in how families actually behave. Lead from a place of real craft knowledge and hands-on understanding of what it takes to ship.
• Operate with agency. Don't wait for permission. Create the conditions for your and your team's success. Bias toward action, starting before you have the full picture and bringing others along as you learn. Hold yourself and others accountable and avoid attributing setbacks to external conditions.
• Serve as a model for AI-first Design at Babylist. Use AI-native workflows in your own work, ship things yourself, and help define the rituals and practices that the rest of the function will adopt.
• Scale design democratization. Build AI-enabled workflows that bring others into design tools, creating the conditions for non-designers to contribute meaningfully to the experience layer. Act as a consultant and quality bar on that work, not a gatekeeper. 
• Build a high-performing design team. Hire, develop, retain, and organize designers that execute with speed and quality. Create a growth-mindset-fueled environment where designers do their best work. Manage performance directly and invest in the career growth of everyone on your team.
• Multiply your team. Be an excellent partner to engineering, product management, analytics, marketing, and merchandising leaders as co-builders to move the highest-impact work forward. Bring tighter problem framing, sharper user insight, and prototypes that make decisions easier to make.
• Contribute to the shape of the Consumer Tech organization. Work with the VP of Product Design, your peers, and other leaders across Tech to evolve our operating model, our hiring bar, and our craft standards as the team transitions.

Your starting salary will be based on your location, experience, and qualifications, with increases over time tied to performance, role growth, and internal pay equity.

Babylist is the leading platform for expecting and new families. More than 10 million people shop with Babylist every year, making it the go-to destination for seamless purchasing, guidance, and expert recommendations. As a modern, AI-forward tech company, Babylist has expanded from a universal registry into a full ecosystem — the Babylist Shop, Babylist Health, Babylist Money, NYC and LA showrooms, branded content, and more — generating $750M in revenue in 2025. Building the generational brand in baby, Babylist is reshaping the $235B kids and baby market and helping parents feel confident, connected, and cared for at every step.

Babylist is remote-first with team members across the U.S. and Canada who move fast, think smart, and use AI as part of how they work every day — not as an experiment, as an expectation. We come together twice a year to build the relationships behind the work, and we hire people who are genuinely excited about what's possible and prove it through how they show up.

• We work with focus and intention, then step away to recharge
• We believe in exceptional management and invest in tools and opportunities to connect with colleagues
• We build products that positively impact millions of people's lives
• AI is intentionally embedded in how we work, create, and scale—supporting innovation and impact

• Competitive pay and meaningful opportunities for career advancement
• We believe technology and data can solve hard problems
• We're committed to career progression and performance-based advancement

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