Product Design Fellow

The Short Version

You'll design products that don't exist yet for founders building companies that don't exist yet. Not redesigns. Not portfolio polish. Interfaces that didn't have a user yesterday and need a thousand happy ones by next quarter.

What Liminal Is

A Founders Studio. We co-build with repeat founders, many of them unicorn founders, providing build expertise, capital, and unfair access from founding to Series B. We call ourselves a Founders Studio because venture studio undersells what we do and oversells what most of them deliver.

What This Role Actually Is

Product design at zero-to-one is applied behavioral science. You're the person who catches why one onboarding flow converts and another bleeds users at step three, clocks why Linear's keyboard shortcuts feel inevitable before everyone else copies them, and understands at a cellular level why some products feel like a thought finishing itself and others feel like work.

You'll embark on projects with our Founders, designing the first user-facing surface of a venture from a blank Figma file: information architecture, interaction model, visual system, micro-interactions, copy. You'll get range across industries before you specialise – different ventures, different users, different problem spaces. You partner with engineers to ship, but pretending to be one isn't the job. Product thinking and craft first.

The Work

• Product thinking and architecture. Build the structural foundation of a venture's product: information hierarchy, user flows, mental models, edge cases. The skeleton every later pixel hangs on.
• Interaction and interface. Wireframes, prototypes, polished UI. Real design work. Precise, considered, opinionated. A flow that makes a user say oh, of course. A first-time experience that gets to value in ninety seconds.
• Research and synthesis. Run user interviews, usability sessions, and competitive teardowns. Turn what you hear into a point of view, not a transcript dump. Personas grounded in observed behavior, not personas in name only.
• Microcopy and content design. The button label, the empty state, the error message. The places where most products give up and where the good ones quietly win.
• Design systems and craft. Build the system that lets a small team move fast without things going sideways. Spacing, type, color, components – internally consistent, externally invisible.

Who You Are

• Deep product literacy. We don't care about your degree (or if you have one). We care if you can explain why Linear's onboarding works, why Notion's empty state is doing more work than people realize, and what Stripe and Things 3 have in common despite serving completely different jobs.
• Exquisite taste. Not good taste. Exquisite. The kind where a two-pixel misalignment ruins your afternoon. Where you have opinions about loading spinners. Where you can articulate why an interaction feels right three beats before anyone else in the room catches up.
• Strategic clarity. You can take a founder's 45-minute monologue about a problem and ship a clickable prototype that makes them say yes, exactly that.
• Comfort with ambiguity. Zero-to-one environments. No existing user base. No analytics dashboard. No design system to inherit. A founder with a world-changing obsession and a blank Figma file. That should thrill you, not paralyze you.
• Contrarian streak. Independent thinker. Arguments from first principles. Unafraid of unpopular positions. You believe the best designs survive open critique. You know how to disagree and commit.
• Early-career, high-trajectory. One to three years of work behind you – agency, in-house, startup, consultancy, or your own project. We care about evidence of work you've shipped, not titles you've held. Figma fluency assumed.

Unicorn Points If

You have serious industrial design and mechanical engineering chops. You've logged 2000+ hours on CAD and can also prototype in code. You read your own React, even if you don't ship it. Also points if you have a research-deep background: cognitive science, behavioral economics, ethnography. Bonus, not the job. But if you can move fluidly between AutoCAD, Figma, and a working prototype while including a brief commentary on how the design is anti-brutalist without a handoff, you become unreasonably dangerous.

Fellowship, not internship

Twelve months. Meaningful stipend. Embedded in a core project alongside experienced builders. Not fetching coffee, that's the leaders job. Not watching from the mezzanine. If you've been looking for a way into startup life or zero-to-one product design at the earliest stage, this is the door.