Staff Product Designer, Activation

At Vanta, our mission is to help businesses earn and prove trust. We believe that security should be monitored and verified continuously, and we empower companies to practice better security and prove it with ease. Vanta has a kind and talented team, and while some have prior security experience, many have been successful at Vanta without it. We are seeking a Staff Product Designer for the Activation team in our Self-Serve group. For a startup, getting SOC2 and ISO compliant is often the first serious security milestone, and it can stall for months. Activation exists to change that: we want every startup that signs up for Vanta to reach audit-ready in days, not months with an AI. The Activation team is responsible for helping customers get key value out of the product after they purchase. When customers get that value, they're more likely to retain and grow. Activation is an experimentation team, an execution team, and a collaborative platform team - influencing how the rest of the company does growth and designs for a consistent growth experience. As the Staff Product Designer on Activation, you'll set the experience vision for how customers get compliant with Vanta and you'll carry it from strategy to shipped product. You'll own work that spans multiple quarters, shape the roadmap with your PM and engineering partners, and set direction in a space where the right answer isn't obvious yet. You'll proactively champion craft, best growth experience practices, and a data centric approach to design. You'll also document the strategy and lead the room: sometimes authoring briefs that define our bets, and running stakeholder forums that keep large initiatives moving. You will report to a Design Manager on the Self-Serve design team, within Vanta's Experience Design organization. What you’ll do as a Staff Product Designer at Vanta: - Set the end-to-end experience vision for Activation, from first login to to activation and turn it into a roadmap work your squad can ship cycle by cycle. - Act as a key driver of product shape and roadmap alongside your PM and EM, bringing a clear design point of view backed by customer evidence and data. - Design agent-first experiences: decide what the Vanta Agent does on its own, where people review and approve, and how the product earns trust at each step. - Create new, reusable AI patterns and extend existing ones, so other teams can build guided, agentic experiences faster and more consistently. - Define the activation outcomes your work is accountable for, partner with Data to instrument them, and run the experiments and iterations that move them. - Lead customer discovery with cross functional partners and lean engineering teams and share what you learn with leadership in a clear, compelling narrative. - Align partner teams so growth experiences feel like one product, not an org chart. - Document the product strategy for your area: write briefs, and POV docs that frame the problem, the bet, and the plan, so partners can make decisions without you in the room. - Drive large, multi-team initiatives from kickoff to launch in partnership with your Activation squad: set up and run recurring reviews and working sessions with key stakeholders, track decisions and dependencies, and keep everyone aligned as plans change. - Raise the quality bar for interaction, visual, and content craft across Self-Serve through critique, mentorship, and close partnership with engineering through launch. - Help grow the design team by mentoring other designers and helping uphold the hiring bar. How to be successful in this role: - 8+ years of experience designing and shipping high-quality B2B SaaS products, including work that spans multiple teams and quarters. - A track record of designing for business outcomes such as activation, onboarding completion, time-to-value, or retention, and the ability to say where the number started and where it landed. - Experience shipping AI-powered or automation-heavy products, with a strong point of view on how people and agents should work together. - Proven ability to set direction in ambiguous, high-stakes problem spaces: you frame the problem, write the brief, make principled tradeoffs, and bring a clear position to the table. - Strong written strategy skills. You've authored product briefs, strategy docs, or roadmaps that leadership used to make real decisions. - Experience leading large-scale, cross-functional initiatives, including running the recurring meetings, reviews, and rituals that keep many stakeholders aligned and work moving. - Fluency with product analytics and experimentation. You define success metrics, design tests, and change course based on results, including the ones you didn't want. - Exceptional interaction, visual, and content craft on dense, complex product UI, plus experience building patterns that scale across teams. - Strong storytelling and communication skills. You can align a squad, partner teams, and executives around a direction, and keep momentum through setbacks. - Experience working through and alongside other designers to deliver larger efforts, and a habit of mentoring and giving candid, useful feedback. - A portfolio is required, showing end-to-end product work, the reasoning behind key decisions, and the outcomes it delivered. - Experience with product-led growth, onboarding, or guided-setup experiences, especially for small teams or founders. - Experience designing agentic workflows, conversational interfaces, or human-in-the-loop review flows. - Comfort prototyping in code or with AI tools to test ideas quickly with customers and partners. - Familiarity with security, compliance, or GRC. It helps, but it isn't required: many of our designers learned the domain on the job. - Uses AI in day-to-day work to amplify their skills and strengthen their outcomes, applying it across routine workflows, actively building fluency through experimentation, and exercising sound judgment to