Startup Designer / Product Manager

Bubbl Founding Team

Part-Time or Full-Time

Please apply here: https://bubbl.co/listing/startup-designer-and-product-manager?showinterest=yes

About Bubbl

At Bubbl, we’re reinventing travel by focusing on community, connection, and shared experiences. Our platform helps like-minded people discover and join shared travel experiences and accommodations — from festival stays and co-living moments to professional or lifestyle-centric trips — making travel more social, affordable, and meaningful. Life is better when shared, and our product vision puts people and community at the center of that experience.

Role Overview

We are looking for a Design & Product Manager Hybrid to lead product and design (UX and UI) for Bubbl that elevates both function and aesthetic experience — ensuring our platform feels intuitive, delightful, and emotionally engaging while scaling to meet real world travel and community needs. This is a unique opportunity to shape the product vision of a fast-growing, early stage, and pre-Series A social travel platform where thoughtful design and deep empathy for users, and delivering products that meet our core values are core to our success.

You will work closely with the CEO, Ops, and Engineering to define and deliver product experiences that feel delightful and solve real user problems — from discovery to booking to group engagement to community activation.

What You’ll Do

Product Vision & Strategy

• Define and own the product roadmap with a design-first mindset, balancing user needs with business goals.
• Partner with leadership to evolve the product vision in ways that reinforce Bubbl’s unique social travel value proposition.
• Translate insights into compelling product opportunities that elevate emotional and pragmatic user experiences.

User-Centered UX UI Design & Research

• Lead and influence design thinking throughout the product lifecycle — from discovery and ideation to prototyping and delivery.
• Conduct and incorporate qualitative and quantitative user research to validate hypotheses, uncover unmet needs, and measure impact.
• Champion user empathy across the organization and ensure design solutions are grounded in real world traveler behaviors.
• Own and manage all product designs for Bubbl.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Drive alignment with engineering to ensure execution excellence and shared ownership of outcomes.
• Partner with other teams to amplify product value, realise product-led growth, and deliver seamless launch experiences.
• Clearly communicate roadmaps, prioritization decisions, metrics, and learnings to stakeholders.

Execution & Delivery

• Define and manage product requirements, design documentation, user stories, and acceptance criteria with a thoughtful eye toward experience quality.
• Respond to product performance of key metrics and user feedback loops that are generated by operations, iterating quickly to improve engagement and satisfaction.
• Advocate for design quality and usability in every decision — from MVP features to long-term enhancements.

Who You Are

Skills & Experience

• 4+ years in UX design and/or product management with demonstrable impact shipping consumer or marketplace products.
• A proven design sensibility — deep appreciation for UX, interaction, visual design, usability, and emotional experience.
• Experience designing in rapid iteration environments.
• Strong communicator with an ability to articulate the “why” behind product decisions that balance user delight with business goals.
• Comfortable using data to inform decisions but also trusting human insights where quantitative signals fall short.
• Highly collaborative mindset with bias toward transparency and cross-functional teamwork.
• AI-first mentality for solving problems and moving fast across product, design, and engineering disciplines.

Nice to Have

• Experience in travel, B2B or consumer marketplaces, community platforms or social apps.
• Passion and background working in early stage startups.
• Exposure to accessibility and inclusive design practices.

Why Join Bubbl

• Gain future-proof skills working across UX and PM disciplines - as AI transforms product development, more and more positions will be hybrid. This is an opportunity to flex both muscles
• Broaden your portfolio and resume with a pre-Series A company at which you will have broad impact
• Opportunity to grow as the company scales - as an early stage employee, there are many areas you can lean into and learn.
• We are building a movement for a completely new way to travel and meet others meaningfully as an evolution of the path pioneered by brands like Craigs List, Couch Surfing, and Airbnb for enabling connected travel. You have the opportunity to be the designer for that experience and the remit from the CEO to design the best in- Bubbl experience ever.
• Influence how real experiences are designed and shared by people all around the world.

Core Values You’ll Embody

• Willingness to lean in, put on the hat we need driven by your desire to help the company succeed, rather than stay in one lane.
• Empathy first: deeply understand users, leaders, and their pain points and needs
• Design as strategy and product led growth: See design as essential to product success in every minute detail
• Collaborative ownership: Thrive in cross-team environments where shared success matters.
• Iterate boldly: build, test, learn — quickly.
• Personify Bubbl’s Core Values: Serendipity, integrity and inclusion, responsibility and valued contribution, infinite possibilities, and fun, as seen here: https://bubbl.co/about

Job Types: Full-time, Part-time, Contract

Pay: Up to $30.00 per hour

Expected hours: 10 – 40 per week

Work Location: Remote