Posted on: 
May 11, 2023

Product Designer

Job Description

Hey there! We're looking for a new member to join the Ghost team, maybe that's you?

We're a non-profit organisation on a mission to create modern, independent publishing technology to power the future of online journalism.

This is not a rocket-ship. You won't find any unicorn glitter or exponential curves around here, just a real company with a sustainable business which has been profitable from year 1 and has been growing healthily ever since. Currently our Annual Recurring Revenue is $6,000,000. We're very transparent about our mission and our metrics, you can read all about us.

Ghost is a full stack web application for running independent publications and newsletters, paving the way for the ever-growing creator economy. It’s one of the most popular modern open source projects in the world, and is used in by tens of thousands of creators and companies.

Our users range from some of the world's largest creators, vloggers, podcasters and makers, to mainstream publications like The Stanford Review and Harvard International Review. Companies use Ghost for their publishing needs too, so you'll see our product powering blogs for people like Apple, Square, DuckDuckGo, OpenAI, CloudFlare, Digital Ocean, Mozilla, Tinder and many, many more.

As the company grows, we're looking for talented designers to join our product team, and help us build a world-class product. We care deeply about design and prioritise it at the heart of everything we do, so this is a role that comes with a lot of ability to make a meaningful impact on the direction of the whole company.

About the job  

As Product Designer at Ghost, you'll be the driver behind the creation of easy-to-use products that are visually appealing to our customers. Your responsibilities will include working throughout the product development cycle from conducting user research, defining producing specifications, concepting, detailed design, front-end code, design support, and QA. You'll work closely with our development team, other product designers and the customer success team. You're all about figuring out what products and features tie in with market and customer needs.

Everyone at Ghost is an engineer, including our design team. We're looking for designers who are as comfortable working in HTML/CSS as they are in Figma. There's no "hand-off" process at Ghost, all designers deliver their own creations and are responsible to the full spectrum of tasks from ideation, to front-end development, and performance analysis.

What this role involves:

🎨 Creation of user interfaces, features, workflows and new ideas. Working directly on the core Ghost product and helping to define and improve what's coming next.

⚡️ Working with design and marketing teams to define, evolve, and maintain Ghost's identity across all product touch points and documentation.

💑 We work on cross-functional product teams of 2-4 people, usually one designer and a few developers.

👻 Lots of freedom to take control of your process, iterating and learning what works (and what doesn't), and putting your work into production. There's a lot of opportunity for professional growth here, as the team expands.

📢 Communicating effectively with stakeholders when presenting your work and clearly articulating your design rationale

🤹‍♂️ Managing multiple projects, while setting appropriate expectations and meeting realistic deadlines

We’re looking for someone who is:

Very comfortable with code. Ghost is a software company, and everyone here codes in one way or another. You'll need to be comfortable with coding your designs in modern HTML & CSS — knowledge of React is a bonus.

Confidently independent. All teams at Ghost operate fairly autonomously, and all team members are responsible for helping make decisions about what needs to be done. You'll need to be comfortable ideating, prototyping, testing and delivering designs without someone standing over your shoulder telling you what to do.

Meticulous about style. We don't A/B test 50 shades of blue to determine what converts best, we care about making beautiful things which we love, ourselves.

Humble but opinionated. We like smart people who have lots of ideas, yet are happy to discard their former opinions whenever a better way of doing things presents itself.

A clear communicator. Good design is good communication, and as a remote team which communicates almost exclusively through writing — concise, written communication is absolutely essential to this role.

An active collaborator. We look for people who actively want critical feedback on their work early and often, and who get a kick out of refining and pushing what they do as a collaborative process because it creates a better end result. No design heroes.

Hungry for meaningful work, and space to do it. Almost all work at Ghost is complex and challenging, but also deeply rewarding. This is a role where you can help influence design over the long term, not just fulfil a temporary brief which needs to be delivered quickly.

We don't mind where you're based or what hours you work, but this role does require reasonable working-hours overlap with the rest of our product/marketing teams in Europe.

We value diversity of all types at Ghost and our team is made up of a kind, thoughtful group of people with a wide range of backgrounds. Some of us are single, others are married, while others are parents. We actively try to find people with different perspectives and experiences to the ones we already have.

All jobs at Ghost come with

💵 Competitive salary
Based on role, skill, experience and location.

🌍 Work from anywhere
From a home office, or travel continuously if that's your thing. Everything we do is online. As long as you have wifi, you're all set.

💻 Hardware included
A new laptop + $500 office workspace setup budget.

🏢 Co-working covered
If you prefer to work from a co-working space, we'll help pay for it.

📚 Continue your personal development
There's a budget for attending conferences, taking courses, and purchasing books.

✈️ Team retreats
The last few trips have taken us to Dubai, Thailand, Austria & Egypt.

📅 Last Friday of the month off
We close the office on the last Friday of each month. Enjoy your 3 day weekend!

🏝 Unlimited paid vacation
We close the office for 2 weeks each December, and encourage everyone to take regular time off from work to relax.

👶 Paid parental leave
When the time comes to welcome a new member of the family, we offer generous and fully paid parental leave.

📈 Pay reviews
Everyone receives an annual pay review, and compensation is updated based on performance.

🧘‍♀️ Meeting-free focus
Most people at Ghost have 1 or 2 zoom calls a week at most. We like to keep calendars empty and leave plenty of space for focusing on creative work.

Our hiring process

We’re profitable, AKA we have unlimited runway, and we have very healthy revenue growth. There's no investor pressure, time limit, or need to hire as many people as fast as possible to fill a fancy office. We want to keep the team small, automate as much as possible with robots, build great software, and enjoy our work. Those are the things we optimise for. If that sounds like a good fit for you, then we’d encourage you to get in touch.

Our hiring process and timeline can vary from role to role, but typically you can expect:

Step 1: We'll review your application against the needs of team.

Step 2: A video call with a member of the operations team so we can get to know each other a little better. It's an informal call, there's nothing to prepare.

Step 3: A second video call, usually with the hiring manager and another member of the team. This call has a more technical focus and gives you the opportunity to find out what might be like to be a member of the Ghost team.

Step 4: A paid trial project - typically 10-20 hours of work. This provides a great opportunity to understand what it's like to work with each other, prior to pursuing a full time offer.

Step 5: A final interview to review the trial project.

Step 6: An offer 🎉

How to apply  🚀

The button below will take you to the application form for this position where you can tell us a little more about yourself. We generally get lots of applications for each open position, so please take your time and give plenty of detail when filling out details in the form!

Women and minorities of any description are especially encouraged to apply.

Apply now

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