Tl;dr
* £75-85k salary. Full-time role.
* 5+ years of professional experience required
* In office 4+ days /week (London, Shoreditch).
* Spill is a small company (12 FTEs)
Spill and the business
Spill was set up with the goal of providing as many people as possible with high-quality mental health support free at the point of use. Spill’s product provides therapy and counselling to employees in businesses (paid for by the company). Currently, we deliver over 3,000 therapy sessions every month which likely wouldn’t have happened if Spill didn’t exist.
Spill is a semi-mature startup. We work with over 500 businesses and over the last 6 months we’ve been profitable as a business. We have taken VC investment in the past though and the ambition of the company is to scale and grow to put Spill in as many businesses as possible. This means that it’s likely we’ll take additional investment in the future when our growth is limited by money.
Spill has 12 FTEs most of which are in our product team which currently consists of 1 PM, 1 product ops person, 6 engineers, and 1 freelance designer (we’re hiring for this role to be permanent now - very exciting!).
The role
We’re looking for a full-stack designer to, in abstract terms, help make our product more useful to customers.
This role is going to be critical for helping Spill achieve its mission. One major way that Spill sets itself apart from the other offerings is by being easier to use. The other main way is by having more useful functionality. You’ll be at the heart of making both of these things happen.
To do that you will:
* Conduct user research mostly in the format of live user interviews. A lot of the time (80%) you’ll be doing this research on a specific hypothesis we have about a problem we could solve or an opportunity we see. Some of the time (20%) you’ll be searching for new hypotheses and opportunities for Spill.
* Produce screens in Figma quite quickly for our 3 web apps (counsellor, employee, company administrator). Spill has an existing design system we’ve been building on for over a year and can now produce designs to show users and discuss as a team quickly. You’ll be making screens using the design system but always be applying your intuition and judgement so that we don’t become over-reliant process.
* Monitor the progress of the projects you’ve worked on. This will look like tweaking things post-release in response to feedback, follow-up interviews with customers and giving feedback to engineers on the implementation to make sure that your work is having the impact you expected.
* Run the design system. You’ll be improving components and adding new ones when necessary. You’ll run the design system in general in partnership with our front-end lead.
In terms of experience we’re looking for:
* 5+ years of professional experience
* Inclusive of the above: 2+ years working in a company with less than 250 employees
* A track record of doing good work while being the only designer in a high-functioning team
* A strong understanding of the design fundamentals learned through mentorship and/or a traditional education
The types of projects you’ll work on
Here are a couple of examples of projects we have coming up to give you a taste of what you would be working on:
Therapist profiles
Spill’s current booking system allows you to select any preferences you have (eg male/female therapist, specialists, etc) and then choose a time slot that works for you. Since the rest of the industry lets you pick based on a therapist's profile instead it’s reasonable to think we might be missing a trick by not having them. Your role would be to research this idea more and design some tests to run within the product.
Work with your own therapist
Spill currently hires therapists and allows people to book with them. However, some employees with access to Spill already have their own private therapist that they don’t want to switch from. You would need to speak with therapists who don’t currently work with Spill to understand how they’d feel about the concept of being paid through Spill. Then, you’d be creating screens and iterating on them with the team.
Reasons why you might not like the job
We want to be clear about what Spill isn’t. Here are some of the things we can think of as to why somebody would not like this role:
* Spill’s project is more mature than an early-stage startup and potentially more mature than our company size suggests. We’re not pre-product market fit and we have things like a design system for example. This is not one of those “Founding Designer” roles that you see around and you’ll be working on top of a product that customers are already using and on a design system that’s in place already.
* You won’t be learning from somebody more experienced than you in the design discipline during your time at Spill. Since your manager will be the founder and it’s unlikely we’ll be hiring somebody more experienced than you in the next 12+ months you will have to be okay with sacrificing how quickly you’ll be improving at the technical side of design knowing that you'll get more scope to improve quickly in the other areas.
* Some of the work will be boring. Since you will have nobody junior to hand tasks off to you will have to do things like sending out emails for user interviews, making tweaks to designs, and making LinkedIn ads for marketing.
Reasons why you might like the job
Equally, we think there are some unique opportunities in this role. Here are some of the specific things we can see as to why somebody would like this role:
* You will have full autonomy within design at Spill. You’ll be the primary person representing design in most conversations meaning you’ll always have your voice heard and you’ll get to make decisions and see how they play out.
* You’ll be working with a competent and functional team. We’ve gone past the “rag-tag bunch of misfits startup stage” and have people in roles who are expected to hold up their end of the bargain. We're a serious business with a serious mission.
* The work you do will really matter. As the 13th employee, you will effectively be one-thirteenth responsible for putting Spill into thousands of companies and delivering hundreds of thousands more therapy sessions in the future.