Product Designer Jobs

**ONLY CONSIDERING BOSTON AREA CANDIDATES AT THIS TIME**

The Company:

Ophelia Labs is a recently founded company in Boston focused on strengthening intergenerational bonds in families.Our product, Kinsome, makes it easy and fun for grandparents and grandkids to grow closer while exploring the parallel journeys of childhood and elderhood. Leveraging recent advancements in AI, Kinsome bridges the communication gap between these generations to drive more frequent and engaging conversation and deepen relationships.

The Role:

We feel strongly that the “founding team” at a company is the single most powerful factor in their chances of success.We also believe that while “founders” often get the most attention, the broader founding team, who “fight the good fight” to product market fit, deserve more credit (and equity compensation).As the 4th team member and the first designer, we feel confident in saying this role is critical to our success and will be treated as such.

At our stage, it hopefully goes without saying that we are looking for someone who is comfortable wearing a lot of hats (to use the startup cliché), who enjoys moving at an extremely fast pace and learning on the fly, and who can make progress independently but enjoys collaborating with our small but mighty team.

Needs:

As the founding designer on the team, we need someone who can fill all the different design roles from research to pixel pushing.We understand nobody excels at every one of those roles, but as a startup that is just getting started, perfection is not a priority right now.

• Someone who adopts a team-first culture, with little tolerance for inflated egos or disrespectful behavior.We also strongly believe that work should be fun, and that it’s ok to love coming to work!
• Someone who is scrappy and understands we have very limited resources at this stage…and ideally savors the opportunity to do more with less and win as the underdog.
• Someone who loves talking to customers…mostly because we want everyone at Ophelia Labs to love talking to customers!But for this role especially, we expect this person to be talking to customers regularly.

Wants:

We are intentionally building a Boston-centric early team, as we think it’s critical to have significant in-person time together in these early years as we’re iterating quickly and building our culture.We certainly expect to offer significant WFH flexibility and envision a hybrid model, but do believe in the power of working together in person regularly.

We would love to find someone who has been at a <10 person startup before and experienced that wild rollercoaster ride.It’s not a stage for most people, but for those who love it, it’s the only place to be (we know from experience).

We are hoping to find someone who has been a designer at a Consumer software company, and particularly one with a Social component and/or elements of gamification.

Nice-to-Haves:

Our product has no shortage of challenging personas to design for, so it would be great to bring someone onboard who has some experience already designing for one or more of them!Whether that means experience designing products for older folks or for kids (we recognize both of those groups encompass an array of personas!), we would love to build off that experience!

Even though we are already looking for the rare product designer who can serve as a design-team-of-one, at our stage, the things to be done far outweigh the dedicated skill-sets/bodies we have to perform them.So if you have other talents (maybe you write some frontend code or have experience working with marketing from a brand perspective), we promise we will put them to use (even if you don’t have other talents but have an eagerness to try new things and learn new skills, we’ll take it!).

The Problem We’re Solving:

The U.S. Surgeon General just declared loneliness and social isolation a national epidemic that warrants urgent attention. Loneliness has proven to have deadly health impacts, affecting mortality at a level equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.These health effects disproportionately harm older folks, where loneliness increases premature death risk by as much as 50%. With America and the world in general becoming proportionately older at a rapid pace (10k Americans turn 65 every day!) as birth rates have declined and life expectancies have increased, this national crisis is poised to get much worse in the coming decades.

Kinsome aims to fight this problem by bringing families closer together across generations, with an emphasis on providing a platform that not only includes the senior generations, but makes them the center of attention.By conditioning families to share more, more often, with each other and especially with their eldest members, Kinsome will help drive back the loneliness epidemic and provide aging grandparents with more purpose and support.