Forward-Deployed Product Designer - FDPSD (US Remote)
About the role
We're looking for a Forward-Deployed Product Designer to lead product design for customer deployments and turn those learnings into reusable product patterns. This is a client-facing, high-context design role.
Responsibilities
- Lead Product Design for Customer Projects
- Work directly with customers to understand their business operations, user roles, workflows, pain points, and success criteria.
- Translate complex operational requirements into clear user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and product specifications.
- Own the design direction for customer-facing deployments, ensuring the final experience is intuitive, consistent, and aligned with the customer's actual business process.
- Facilitate design reviews with customers and internal teams to drive clarity, alignment, and fast decision-making.
- Bridge Customers, Product, and Engineering
- Partner closely with forward-deployed engineers and product managers to ensure that what is designed, built, and shipped is aligned.
- Help reduce ambiguity by turning customer conversations into actionable design decisions and implementation-ready requirements.
- Communicate tradeoffs clearly across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Support onboarding, scoping, delivery, and iteration cycles with strong design judgment and customer empathy.
- Build Reusable Design Patterns
- Identify recurring customer needs, workflows, screens, and interaction patterns across deployments.
- Contribute those learnings back into Tailor’s design system, UI libraries, templates, and internal implementation patterns.
- Help create repeatable design artifacts that make future deployments faster, more consistent, and higher quality.
- Improve internal handoff flows, requirement intake, design documentation, and customer communication patterns.
- Shape the Product Roadmap
- Distill recurring customer insights into strategic product themes and high-impact feature opportunities.
- Partner with product and engineering teams to prioritize improvements that advance Tailor’s platform vision.
- Use customer project learnings to help Tailor evolve from custom implementation patterns into scalable product capabilities.
Requirements
5+ Years of Product Design Experience
Strong experience designing software products, preferably in SaaS, enterprise software, ERP, internal tools, operational systems, or developer platforms.
Experience moving from ambiguous customer problems to clear product experiences and implementation-ready design specs.
Strong Customer-Facing Design Skills
Comfortable working directly with customers, facilitating discovery sessions, presenting design concepts, and incorporating feedback.
Able to understand both business requirements and user needs, then translate them into practical product decisions.
Strong communication skills — you can make complex workflows simple, visual, and actionable.
Systems Thinking and Design Craft
Organized, structured thinker who can reduce ambiguity and create clarity across teams.
Strong understanding of design systems, reusable components, interaction patterns, and product consistency.
Able to balance customer-specific needs with scalable product and platform patterns.
Technical Fluency
With the help of coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, etc.), you are expected to produce working prototype, submit PR, collaborate effectively with engineers, understand implementation tradeoffs, and ask the right questions.
Familiarity with APIs, data models, workflows, permissions, or configurable software platforms is a strong plus.
Location and Travel
Based in the United States or within its timezone. Expected travel: approximately 10–20%.
Nice to Have
- Experience with ERP, internal tools, operational SaaS, supply chain, inventory, order management, finance, or commerce systems.
- Experience designing for low-code, no-code, composable, or developer-first platforms.
- Consulting, implementation, or customer onboarding experience.
- Experience contributing to or maintaining a design system or component library.
- Comfortable supporting multiple stakeholders and balancing competing priorities across customer delivery and internal product work.
Benefits
Health, dental, vision, flexible PTO, and more.
Why Tailor?
You'll work directly with the product team on a fast-growing platform solving real operational pain. If you love being the voice of the customer, reducing friction, and making teams more effective — let’s talk.