Design GitHub, the product

👋 Hello reader, this blog post has aged 6 years since I originally wrote it in 2017. That's about 42 “internet years” you know, so it's probably quite stale by now and may not reflect my current thinking. I am happy to keep it here for archival purposes, but please reach out to me if something feels off or if you're relying on it for any serious purpose.

Thanks,
Patrick

---

Are you designer who enjoys building products and wants to work on a highly visible one? I’m looking to a hire code-conscious product designer to join my team at GitHub.

What this position is

This is a product design position. You’ll be working with product managers, engineers, design managers, and other product designers to define, design, and build features on GitHub dot com. You’ll research, sketch, create mockups, write code, and deploy to production. You’ll probably introduce a few bugs — its cool, we all do. Your work will be reviewed and you will review others’ work. You will use GitHub to build GitHub.

Is this position remote?

We value a remote work. So much so that most of our product design team is remote. In an effort to create more of a geographically balanced team, we’re currently only considering candidates that live in the San Francisco area (or are willing to relocate) and can work out of our office in SOMA.

What type of projects will I get to work on?

GitHub builds products for developers, businesses, open source organizations, educational institutions, government agencies and just about anyone who is involved in building and shipping software. About 20 million people currently use GitHub.com around the world.

My group within the product design team primarily focuses on the businesses that use GitHub, as well as the integrators that build products to extend our platform in various ways. This means you’ll get to work on stuff like:

• Providing organizations enterprise-class tools to help manage and support teams of all sizes
• Helping developers discover and install integrations to add functionality to their projects on GitHub
• Giving integrators a great experience to build on top of, extending the core functionality of GitHub

Additionally, you’ll provide input and feedback that helps influence the direction of product designers working on other areas of GitHub.

This position might be a great fit if

• You have a few years experience designing software or websites
• You can talk and write about your work
• You’re comfortable with people having strong opinions about your work and are comfortable sharing yours
• You can use HTML and CSS as a design tool (to prototype or build your designs)
• You enjoy shepherding design from concept through implementation
• You can work within a defined design system and can explain why you might need to break outside of it
• You value research as a foundational design component
• You’ve used GitHub before or are familiar with modern developer workflows

This position may not be right for you if…

• You’ve never held a professional design position before
• You don’t have a desire to expand your front-end development skills
• You have serious front-end development chops, but aren’t excited by an iterative design process grounded in research
• You’re really into designing editorial content, digital marketing experiences, conference websites, etc… (we’re hiring those types of web designers, too!)

Applying

If the above interests you, but you aren’t sure if you would be a good fit, feel free ask me any questions via Twitter (my DMs are open). Otherwise, head over to the job application, we’re excited to meet you.

---

Thanks to Sophie Shepherd for inspiring me with her post and for her help editing this one.