Head of Product Design

Shiftbase is building the self-driving assistant for shift-based businesses across Europe. From independent restaurants in Amsterdam to multi-location retailers in München, our customers spend hours every week on scheduling, time tracking, payroll prep, and HR admin. We want to take that work off their plate, and eventually, do it for them.

That's an ambitious product vision, and it's a design challenge before it's anything else. Today, our product is strong but siloed. Three senior designers ship great impactful experiences & features inside their own teams, but inconsistencies show up across the product. Our design system is partly implemented. Research happens, but mostly feature by feature. The vision deserves a coherent, opinionated, recognisably-Shiftbase experience that customers feel in their hands.

You are going to change that.

What you'll do

• Build the design vision. Translate our product vision into an end-to-end experience strategy teams can execute against in phases, short, medium, and long term. Hold the question every day: how does this strengthen the overall Shiftbase experience?

• Unify the team. Turn Justin, Dylan, and Camila, three amazing designers who've been operating independently, into one design team that shares research, critique, and ownership of quality, without smothering craft or autonomy.

• Own the design system as a strategic asset. A living foundation that makes our product feel like one product, gives teams speed, and leaves room for delight. Set the bar beyond "amazing." Bring brand to life through interaction, not just visuals.

• Shared ownership of research with designers. Move us from PM-led validation to shared ownership of research & continuous learning. Embed sub-day testing into the everyday rhythm. Replace build → hope with test → learn → improve (in days).

• Deepen domain understanding. Shift work isn't a generic SaaS category. Help designers go deep on operators, schedulers, hourly workers, payroll specialists, and country-specific compliance across the Netherlands, DACH, and our next markets, so decisions reflect real customer reality & pain. It's how we differentiate.

• Coach the next generation. Build the growth frameworks, career paths, and feedback loops that scale the team. Be a multiplier.

• And stay hands-on. You'll be embedded as an IC in one of our product teams (which one, TBD with you & the team, ⅔ of your time). At our stage, the design lead who only reviews doesn't earn the trust they need to lead.

What success looks like in your first 6–12 months

• The product feels like one product: coherence customers, prospects, and the team can feel.

• Critique culture is real: cross-team critiques running, valued, visibly raising the bar.

• One design system, used by everyone: all teams contributing, shared principles showing up in daily decisions.

• Research has moved: designers initiate and lead testing as standard practice.

What we're looking for

You've done this in the trenches of a complex, multi-role SaaS product (B2B or advanced B2C), with a clear track record of:

• Leading design across multiple teams or product areas

• Building design systems that accelerate teams rather than constrain them

• Driving coherence across fragmented product experiences

• Embedding research and usability testing as a daily practice

• Challenging senior stakeholders when execution drifts from vision

• Coaching designers toward their best work

• Thinking in systems, patterns, and impact/outcomes, not just screens

You're not a solo "super designer," a process-heavy enterprise leader, or a title-first executive who delegates the craft away. You lead through clarity, standards, coaching, and your own hands on the work.

What we offer

• A seat at the Product & Engineering leadership table during a defining chapter for Shiftbase

• A senior design team you'll genuinely enjoy building with

• The room to set the bar, and the support to hold it

• Hybrid working from Amsterdam/Zoetermeer

• Competitive compensation and meaningful equity participation