Head of Product Design

JobsCloseBy Editorial Insights

Halter is seeking a Head of Product Design to own the design vision, strategy, and systems for mobile and web, lead and grow a design team, and partner with product, engineering and GTM leaders to shape roadmaps and outcomes for a real time, data driven cattle farming platform. This is not a hands off role; you will lead from the front, set the quality bar, and raise craft across UX, interaction, visual design and accessibility while building a scalable design system and embracing AI tooling to accelerate delivery. To apply, highlight proven outcomes shipping complex, data rich products, cross functional leadership, and measurable impact; share a portfolio that shows end to end process from vision to delivery, user advocacy, and collaboration with engineers and product managers. Onsite in Auckland.

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Halter is looking for a Head of Product Design to define and craft the future of our product experience. You will own everything from the design vision, strategy, and systems, to the finer details of the user experience, across our mobile and web applications.
You will lead and continue to grow and shape our team of product designers, partnering closely with product and engineering leaders, to solve complex problems for our customers who rely on Halter every minute of the day as their farm operating system.
This is not a hands-off design manager. We’re looking for a leader who operates at the intersection of strategy, leadership, craft, and execution - someone who leads from the front, sets direction, and sets the quality bar, so that Halter’s product experience continues to distance itself as globally best-in-class.

What you'll do:

• Define and evolve Halter’s product design vision, strategy, principles, and standards.
• Establish and scale a design system that enables speed, consistency, and quality across mobile and web (but mobile-first)
• Translate complex, real-world, data and jobs into clear, intuitive digital experiences.
• Own design quality as a competitive advantage and set a bar other companies aspire to.
• Work as a close partner to Product, Engineering, and Go-to-market leadership to shape product strategy, roadmaps, and outcomes.
• Influence what we build and how we build it, not just how it looks.
• Advocate for users while balancing business needs and technical constraints.
• Lead, manage, mentor, and grow a team of product designers across multiple product areas.
• Build a high-performance design culture grounded in craft, ownership, velocity and continuous improvement.
• Lift the performance ceiling of your team by leaning into and leveraging evolutions in technology, especially AI and automation.
• Set clear expectations and development paths for designers.
• Elevate design quality and clarity, raising the standard of excellence across every touchpoint.
• Stay close to the work - guiding key flows, reviewing designs, and unblocking teams.
• Drive strong design critique, experimentation, and data-informed decision making.
• Establish best practices across UX research, interaction design, visual design, and accessibility.

Who You Are:

• An experienced product designer with deep craft and strong product instincts.
• Experienced building and shaping design teams, ideally in a Head of Design role.
• Comfortable operating across levels, from vision and strategy down to execution and delivery.
• Experienced designing and scaling complex, data-rich products (e.g. real-time, geo-spatial, or systems-heavy domains). A bonus if you have experience in hardware-enabled software products.
• Experienced and highly effective working with Product and Engineering as peers, and cross-functionally with Go-to-market leaders.
• A champion of intelligence and automation, comfortable shaping a design function to benefit from AI tooling.
• Low ego. Opinionated and fearless, but pragmatic and precise. You are comfortable making hard trade-offs in fast-moving environments, with what’s best for Halter and our customers in mind.
• Genuinely motivated by real-world impact, and building something that will continue to revolutionise one of the world’s most important industries.

Why Halter?
Our Product and Mission:
Our solar-powered smart collars, paired with our digital software platform, make it possible for farmers to virtually fence and remotely shift their cattle, monitor each animal’s behaviour, reproduction and health 24/7, and track the production of pasture and other forages across their land, in real-time.
Our mission is to become the operating system for cattle farming, and revolutionise one of the world's most important industries that has operated much the same way, with the same constraints, for centuries. Halter makes our customers more profitable and more sustainable.
What sets us apart from most SaaS companies?
- Halter is real world in every sense. The product becomes a digital twin of land and animals. It guides animals, models land, monitors behaviours - all in real time.  It is used by customers in the field - rain, snow or shine. - Our customers might be data-hungry and AI-fluent, or this might be the first time they have used technology, especially a mobile app, in their business. The way in which we craft our experiences to cater to this spectrum of users is make or break. - We literally get our hands dirty, working closely with our customers - you will talk to customers constantly, you will get feedback (good and bad), and you will definitely need gumboots - it is hard to beat gathering insights, while standing almost literally in the shoes of our farmers. - We have a track record of taking risks and blazing new trails (which isn’t going to change). Much of what we do has no template or example to follow. Greenfield technical and design challenges are frequent, and our willingness to tackle them keeps us a step ahead of our competition.- We have incredible engineers, who bring things to life with velocity and quality. As quick as we can bring a design concept to life, we can give ourselves the ability to test it, in the field. Calls and prototypes are useful, but our most important learnings come from seeing the real thing in action - nothing can replicate that.