Director of Product Design and Research

Stack Overflow is in the middle of one of the most consequential pivots of its history. We are transforming from the world’s largest developer community to a unified knowledge platform for both humans and agents with our enterprise product as the centerpiece, shaping how organizations will govern and retrieve trusted knowledge at scale. Stack Overflow has assets that no one else has—years of trust signals, developer credibility, and community generated knowledge that AI systems can actually rely on.

The design problems that come with this are genuinely hard. Without a traditional UI, the experience lives inside chat responses, API calls, and contexts we don’t fully own which means design here is heavily weighted toward information architecture, content strategy, and the quality of language. We’re shipping at a pace that requires designers to work closer to code than ever before and that expectation will only grow.

The Director of Product Design and Research owns how the product looks, feels, works, and how we know if it’s working for users. You’ll report to the CPTO, shape strategy at the leadership level, and stay close enough to the work to raise its quality and support and advocate on behalf of the people doing it.

The team is experienced, capable, and already oriented in this direction. They don’t need rebuilding. They need a leader who will help them work with confidence, maintain craft standards under speed and pressure while adopting new ways of working and advocating for the team when it matters. 

What you’ll do

• Own and uphold how design and research work at Stack Overflow include the process, tooling, standards, and craft.
• Own the user experience perspective on how technologists discover and interact with knowledge, and make the ux calls that shape where the product goes.
• Maintain the highest standards of design craft and research quality across every product surface.
• Evolve the team’s AI-first design practice as the technology changes, maintaining the pipeline from concept to working, production-ready code.
• Own and run the team rituals that elevate quality and develop designers and researchers.
• Coach designers and researchers in their career growth, developing both skill and leadership across the team.
• Build a high-trust, feedback driven culture that gives people real autonomy and holds them accountable to their work.
• Be a coauthor of our Sit at the table where product strategy is made and be a vocal advocate for our users and customers to ensure their needs are adequatelypush back when user needs aren’t being represented.
• Work alongside Product and Engineering leaders as part of the EPD leadership team, contribution to how we build software in an AI-first world.
• Build and maintain research infrastructure that actually drives decisions, not just informs them.

What we need to see

• 10+ years of product design experience with a portfolio that demonstrates exceptional design craft and strong end-to-end product thinking
• 4+ years leading and managing design and/or  teams at a product company, 
• Background in B2B or enterprise products, ideally at an AI-native company or one that has strongly pivoted to AI; developer tooling experience a plus.
• A track record of people management that is honest and trust-based.
• Demonstrated ability to fight for your team’s careers, workload, and recognition, not just their output.
• The ability to maintain a clear perspective on what your team needs in a high-pressure, fast-moving environment. 
• Fluency in how AI is changing product surfaces, not just as a tool in the design workflow but also experience designing for ai-native or ai-augmented products.
• Experience designing for AI-native or AI-augmented products, with an understanding of the unique UX challenges they present 
• Comfortable working at the intersection of design and code; you understand functional prototyping and know how to develop that capability in a team without losing people who aren’t there yet.
• Exceptional UI and visual design judgement and the ability to hold the team accountable to a high level of craft.
• Experience deploying research strategically and making findings visible and actionable across a product organization.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate design rationale and influence across various stakeholders.
  
  Salary band - $190,000 - $250,000