Principal Product Designer, Core

BetterUp is a company focused on human transformation, seeking a Principal Product Designer to shape the future of their core product experiences. The role involves owning design strategy, mentoring designers, and influencing product direction while ensuring design excellence across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Architect the design vision for BetterUp’s core product experiences—identifying the highest-leverage opportunities, defining the strategic direction, and ensuring continuity across complex, multi-surface journeys
• Drive design quality and craft standards across the product, raising the bar for the entire Design org through rigorous critique, deep collaboration, and principled decision-making
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Research to shape roadmaps from the earliest stages—bringing design perspective to problem framing, not just solutions
• Lead complex, ambiguous design challenges from 0→1 and 1→n, navigating organizational complexity with clear thinking and strong point of view
• Build and maintain scalable design systems and foundational patterns that enable speed and coherence across teams
• Mentor and elevate senior designers, providing thoughtful feedback that develops taste, confidence, and craft
• Influence VP-level and executive stakeholders with clarity and conviction, earning trust as a thought partner on product and design strategy
• Represent the design function in cross-functional planning, helping align design investment with company priorities
• Shape company-wide AI strategy in partnership with executive leadership, ensuring design’s voice is central to how BetterUp’s AI capabilities are built and experienced
• Remove institutional barriers to AI adoption and drive cultural change that embraces continuous reinvention across the Design org
• Serve as BetterUp’s foremost design expert in AI-powered product experiences, with recognized internal and external influence
• Directly contribute to competitive differentiation through breakthrough design applications that define market leadership

Requirements:

• 10+ years of product design experience, including time at a consumer or B2B SaaS company where design played a central role in product strategy
• A portfolio that demonstrates exceptional craft, systems thinking, and the ability to operate across the full design spectrum—from early concept to polished execution
• Proven track record of leading complex, multi-year design initiatives with measurable impact on product outcomes and user experience
• Deep experience influencing product and engineering direction at the senior leadership level
• Strong design systems sensibility—you understand how foundational decisions compound across a product at scale
• Experience designing products at the intersection of human behavior and technology; familiarity with AI-native product patterns is a strong plus
• Exceptional communication and storytelling skills—you make complex ideas clear and compelling to any audience
• A growth mindset and genuine curiosity about how AI tools can enhance design craft and process