Our customers are high-growth businesses, and they come to us wanting one thing: to get their story out. When the product makes that harder than it should be: a step too many, a flow that doesn't quite land, the story stalls. A small, sharp team keeps those frictions out today. But nobody here is a designer. That's the gap this role exists to close.
At Drumbeat, we have the privilege of creating a new way of working in the post-AI age, free from past organisational constraints. It’s not clear where ways of working will end up, but it is clear that AI is blurring the boundaries between the classic product trio.
To this end, we are imagining three autonomous product builders, each with deep experience in one of the disciplines - and you will bring your deep design expertise to our trio.
Each member of the trio will be encouraged to have opinions on what we build, to talk to customers and validate the team’s bets, to add their taste and judgement to complement the rest of our team, and then to ship the ideas that we think will move the needle.
Then, as the technology evolves, so will our team. If we need more people shipping, we’ll morph that way, if we need to do more discovery, we’ll stop shipping and talk to customers. We coalesce around the outcomes, and bring to bear the skills that we have as individuals to create the best outcome for the customer. You won’t be pigeon holed to work within your role, but you will have the final say on everything design.
What we are chasing here is this: no handovers, no potential for misalignment, deep connection to the customers and the data, all progress towards meaningful customer outcomes.
Operate end-to-end across the SDLC, from talking to customers through to shipping.
Talk to customers directly. Watch them use the product. Bring what you learn back into the work rather than waiting for it to arrive as a ticket.
Turn customer insight into better flows, clearer journeys, and sharper product decisions.
Prototype ideas quickly to pressure-test them before they're built.
Work closely with product and engineering, improve the UX, look and feel of their work, and let their expertise improve yours.
Design for AI-native workflows, where the product suggests, drafts and acts rather than just sitting there as a screen. Few teams have solved this well, and you'll be working it out with us.
Keep the product and the brand reading as one company.
Establish lightweight patterns and standards that speed the team up rather than slow it down.
Have a huge impact on how our customers tell their stories, free from the organisational constraints and handovers that dull down a good idea before customers ever see it.
Deep product design and UX experience. You've spent years doing the real work: customer research, synthesis, journey mapping, prototyping, and shaping the product decisions that follow.
You will have great design taste, but this isn't a role for a pure UI designer or a Figma perfectionist. We care far more about whether the workflow works for the customer than about perfecting every component.
You’ll be technical enough to know when to ask the engineer for help. We don’t want a second engineer, but you’ll have at least cleared the first peak of the Dunning-Kruger curve.
You've worked in zero-to-one environments and can take a vague, messy problem to a shipped answer, without a brief, a product manager, or a research team in between. Comfortable with ambiguity, biased to ship, and able to move without over-processing the problem.
You're pragmatic. Strong visual judgement, but not precious about pixels when the bigger workflow problem still needs solving. You know when to chase quality and when to move.
You can prototype in code, work close enough to it that engineering doesn't have to guess, or have already shipped production-quality software alongside engineers, working within the guardrails they define.
You advocate for the customer, pragmatically, and in a way that helps the team move rather than stall.
AI is how you work, not a tool you've tried. You use it to research, draft, prototype and ship, and you have a view on where it makes design better and where it makes it worse.
A clear point of view, held loosely. You can argue for the work and change your mind when a customer proves you wrong.
You're content being the only designer for a while, and you will be curious about how AI can morph to support Drumbeat before reaching for more design hires as a growth lever.
Experience as an early or founding design hire.
You've designed a product where the software makes decisions, and you've dealt with what happens when it's wrong.
Brand and visual range alongside the product work.
B2B SaaS experience, or a genuine interest in PR, media and comms.
$170,000 to $190,000 NZD base, plus meaningful equity in a company at the very start.
Employee share scheme, four-year vest with a one-year cliff.
New & Improved behind us, and the pedigree that comes with it.
A small team, a short path from idea to shipped, and no layer between you and the work.