Retool
Build internal tools fast.
Product Designer
About the role
WHY WE'RE LOOKING FOR YOU
Our goal at Retool is to radically change the way that developers build custom internal software. Remarkably, creating software today isn't that different from twenty years ago (if anything, it’s gotten harder!). Retool is a dramatically faster and easier way for engineers to build software, combining a visual, drag-and-drop environment with code-based customization, seamless integration with nearly any data source, and instant deployment.
We’ve made great progress so far: thousands of companies rely on Retool to build the custom internal software that powers their businesses, from small startups to Fortune 500 companies. We’re growing quickly and have assembled an incredible set of investors, including Sequoia and the founders of Github, Gusto, PagerDuty, Plaid, Segment, Stripe, and Y Combinator.
The truly exciting part? We’ve barely scratched the surface of the immense opportunity before us. Gartner estimates that up to 50% of all code is written for internal usage. What if you could design the way half of all the world’s software is built? On the design team at Retool, our decisions directly shape the software powering every business in the world: the experiences of the developers who build it—and the sales, marketing, support, operations, legal, and finance teams who operate it.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
To keep up with our fast-paced growth, we’re looking for an experienced Product Designer to join our growing design team. You’ll help to define Retool’s vision, product strategy, and user experience—driving the product design lifecycle from end-to-end. In close collaboration with engineering, you’ll break down technically complex problems and shape them into elegant, novel solutions that are discoverable, learnable, and powerful. And as an early member of the design team, you’ll have great influence in shaping our processes, objectives, and growth.
WHO YOU'll WORK WITH
As a product designer, you’ll be working closely with a diverse team of designers and engineers, while collaborating support, success, sales, and marketing to draw out insights and see products through to market. Customers come first at Retool, so you’ll regularly interact with our users to understand their problems and ensure that we are shipping usable, impactful, and delightful features.
IN THIS ROLE, YOU'LL:
- Own and drive the complete product design lifecycle of major features for Retool
- Partner with growth, support, success, sales, and marketing to understand business objectives and uncover customer insights
- Perform user research to identify problems and validate solutions
- Partner closely with engineers to define product objectives, understand technical constraints, and ideate on solutions
- Produce the artifacts needed—specs, sketches, wireframes, mockups, prototypes, or code—to take UI ideas from conception to production
- Participate in design reviews and share your work regularly with cross-functional team and company leadership
- Contribute to Retool’s design system and component library
- Help establish design team processes and and uphold high standards for design and product quality at Retool
YOU MAY BE A FIT FOR THIS ROLE IF YOU:
- Have a strong portfolio demonstrating generalist design skills and experience driving the product design lifecycle from end-to-end
- Love breaking down technically complex problems into abstractions, finding a balance between ease of use, learnability, and power
- Care deeply about getting the details right through rapid, continual iteration
- Are customer-obsessed and excited to spend time with users
- Have experience designing developer-centric products, creative software, and/or enterprise internal tools
- Are comfortable with basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. (Bonus points if you have some working knowledge of SQL, databases, or APIs!)
- Are an excellent communicator (and consider writing to be a fundamental design skill)
- Thrive in ambiguity, can independently prioritize work based on user needs and business goals, and take responsibility to drive product ideas forward
- Are excited to radically change the way all software is built
About Retool
Retool's a fast way of building internal tools (to manage deliveries, for customer support, etc.). We just hit profitability, have raised money from some great investors, including John + Patrick Collison (Stripe), Elad Gil (Color), Nat Friedman (Github), Greg Brockman (OpenAI), etc. We're looking to scale our engineering team from 15 people to around 25 this year.
Our thesis is that all internal tools have the same building blocks (tables, textinputs, dropdowns, etc.). So Retool gives you those building blocks, which you can combine and compose to make any sort of internal tool you might want. That's a lot faster than writing the same custom code, over and over again. Here's a 3 minute demo.
Our actual goal - though - is to build the future of programming. We think building boring, internal enterprise apps represents most of programming. And if you can make building these boring things a lot faster, you have a good shot at becoming what "comes after programming languages".
