Staff Product Designer, Guest & Discovery

Staff Product Designer, Guest & Discovery

Company

Collaborative Boating operates Boatsetter and GetMyBoat, the two largest marketplaces for getting on the water, now converging into one platform. Guests arrive wanting something specific — a fishing trip, a sunset cruise, a birthday on a pontoon — and we connect them to the captains, operators, and owners who can make it happen. Finding and booking a day outside should be as easy and intuitive as booking a flight.

The problem

Search is changing under us. Guests arrive with intent expressed in natural language, increasingly through an AI assistant instead of a search box, and increasingly on a surface we don't own. Answering that with a chatbot is the obvious move and the wrong one: choosing between boats is a parallel, visual, comparison task, and a conversation is sequential. The work is holding both — a visual discovery experience built for comparison, and a compact, structured expression of a listing that holds up when a third-party assistant renders it in a layout we didn't design.

The center of gravity is the search results card. It's the smallest unit of persuasion we have: a handful of facts, ordered, that a guest uses to decide whether to look closer. Which facts earn a place, in what order, and how that adapts from "boat rental Miami" to "something fun for eight people Saturday" — that's the problem. It's an information design problem before it's a visual one.

What you'll own

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The end-to-end guest discovery experience — search, filtering and refinement, results, map and list, the listing page, and the paths in from organic search and AI assistants. Coherence across both brands and web plus mobile is yours.

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The information hierarchy of the results card, defended with evidence, across guest intents and every state the data actually produces: missing photos, no reviews yet, a price range instead of a price, partial availability.

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Interfaces over a system that infers. Make what it inferred legible, make correcting it easy, and reduce verification labor rather than creating it — a guest who has to double-check our answer has been handed our work.

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Surfaces we don't render. With engineering, shape the structured expression of an experience, an offer, and an operator so it survives being summarized, quoted, or laid out by someone else's assistant.

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Continuous discovery with your pod — a Product Manager and an engineering tech lead. Choose the cheapest artifact that answers the open question; spend fidelity when a decision is actually being committed.

How we work

Five things worth knowing before you apply. They aren't universal, and here they aren't negotiable.

Problem, then system, then experience

We frame the problem, then settle the shape of the system — entities, states, edge cases — and only then design the experience within it. Your rough exploration runs alongside the system design and improves it; committed fidelity comes later. In practice that means days of useful work before there's a screen worth showing, and arguing about data models with your tech lead while the design is still loose. If you need a settled brief before you can start, this will be frustrating.

Discovery is ongoing, not a handed off spec

You talk to guests and operators directly. You bring opportunities forward rather than receiving them. There's no research team handing you findings and no Product Manager writing you requirements — the pod owns the outcome and you're one third of it. We believe the commercial results follow from understanding these customers better than anyone else does, which is why the understanding isn't delegated to a function.

We ask what moved, not what shipped

You define the signal before release and watch it after. Hitting the number you set is the floor, not the finish — the work worth remembering beat it, and we'd rather you aim at that and miss than aim at the floor and land. Sometimes the answer is that your design didn't work,