Principal Product Designer

Job Description:

The Opportunity

At Workhuman, we believe great design is at the heart of making work more human. As a Principal Product Designer, you’ll help shape how millions of employees experience recognition, belonging, and engagement by bringing together business goals, customer insight, and design ideas into coherent, human-centred experiences. You’ll work with senior leaders in Product Design, Product Management, and Engineering to tackle complex problems, set the experience direction, and ensure our products evolve with

clarity and purpose.

This position is for a senior designer who thrives in ambiguity and operates with a long-term mindset. You’ll guide discovery and design efforts across multiple initiatives, leverage design principles, concepts, and systems, and raise the bar for quality through craft, critique, and teamwork. By balancing big ideas with practical solutions, you’ll play a key role in aligning teams, shaping strategic decisions, and turning ideas into experiences that deliver meaningful impact for both people and the business.

The Value You’ll Deliver

• Turn business goals, new opportunities, and technological shifts into a coherent product experience direction that guides long-term growth.

• Look for ways AI can help create new services, workflows, and value
  propositions, shaping future-state scenarios and a north star for what our future products could look like.

• Use AI-assisted tools and speculative scenarios to turn strategic ideas into real prototypes that make what they could look like in practice.

• Partner closely with senior leaders during the early framing of strategic initiatives, helping surface key decisions and their potential impacts.

• Create strategic artefacts, such as experience principles, service models, and mental models, that shape decisions rather than production output.

• Work closely with other designers embedded in product verticals and on the design system team to ensure our long-term plans shape today’s choices and reduce fragmentation.

• Raise the quality of strategic thinking across Product Design by mentoring
  designers and researchers, facilitating feedback sessions, and driving alignment when needed.

• Help improve strategic thinking in Product Design by mentoring others, conducting feedback sessions, and bringing teams together when needed.

• Model how Product Design operates effectively at the leadership and company level, demonstrating how human-centred thinking informs strategy.

What You Bring

• Proven ability to operate at a principal level, influencing senior leaders and
  teams without formal authority.

• Experience collaborating with executive and senior leadership on ambiguous, long-term opportunities.

• Deep understanding of experience strategy and systems thinking.

• High craft credibility in Interaction and Service Design, applied selectively to
  clarify thinking and guide decisions.

• Excellent visual, verbal, and narrative communication skills, with the ability to turn abstract ideas into tangible examples.

• Experience working in platform, AI-enabled, or multi-product settings, with an understanding of Human-AI Interaction, automation, and adaptive systems.

• Comfort using AI tools for ideation, prototyping, and experimentation to explore and communicate future experiences.

• Familiarity with Futures Thinking, Strategic Design, and Business Models approaches.

• Experience mentoring designers and influencing senior peers.

The Company:

At Workhuman® our mission is to bring more humanity to the workplace. We recognise and embrace individuals’ differences and believe that workforce diversity and inclusion are essential to our long-term growth and success. Even if you don’t think you “check every single box” above, please still consider applying. We’re looking for a human who is collaborative, innovative with a growth mindset

We love what we do because we’re shaping the future of work through our people and our technology. Our human cloud-based applications are helping some of the world’s leading global brands connect culture to shared purpose. The Workhuman Cloud empowers employees to thank, talk and celebrate each other, creating an environment that sparks gratitude and human connection while increasing employee engagement and productivity.

• We were named as #5 Best Workplace in the Great Place to Work Awards in Ireland in 2022 in the large-sized workplace category. We were also recognised as the Best Workplace for Women and the Best Workplace in Technology in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

• In 2021 we were named as #2 Best Workplace in Europe in the medium-sized workplace category.

•  We were also recognised as #2 Best Large Places to Work in Boston by Built In for 2023 as well as the Best Place to Work in Boston, U.S. Best Large Places to Work, and U.S. Best Places to Work.

• There are currently over 7.5 million users on the Workhuman® cloud across 180 countries.

• Our core values are Respect, Determination, Innovation, and Imagination.

Workhuman is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees. We proudly provide a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. Employment decisions at Workhuman are based solely on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion or belief, national, social or ethnic origin, sex (including pregnancy), age, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital, civil union or domestic partnership status, past or present military service, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Workhuman believes that diversity and inclusion among our teammates is critical to our success as a global company, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool.