INTERMEDIATE PRODUCT DESIGNER
REPORTS TO: DESIGN LEAD
**Must be based in Johannesburg (On-site or Hybrid)
CORE RESPONSIBILITIES
- Consult with clients independently - ask the right questions for unclear briefs, surface assumptions, and align with stakeholders without needing direction
- Lead design end-to-end across discovery, definition, ideation, prototyping, testing, and delivery within agile sprint cycles
- Facilitate working sessions, design reviews, and client presentations with professionalism and confidence
- Translate complex regulatory, compliance, and domain constraints into clear, usable product experiences
- Collaborate daily with product managers, engineers, QA, etc. - contributing meaningfully to backlog refinement and sprint planning
- Champion the user: Conduct and synthesise research, usability tests, and analytics to ground design decisions in evidence
- Produce high-fidelity prototypes, interaction specs, and developer-ready deliverables that reduce engineering ambiguity
- Maintain and contribute to design systems, pattern libraries, and documentation
- Manage your own time and deliverables across concurrent work streams without supervision
- Informally mentor junior designers and model strong design craft and process standards
SKILLS & COMPETENCIES
Design Craft:
- Mastery of Figma (Components, variables, auto-layout, prototyping, Figma Makes)
- Strong visual design sensibility: Typography, colour, spacing, hierarchy, accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA compliance embedded in workflow, not bolted on)
Product Thinking:
- User-centred mindset with comfort across qualitative and quantitative research methods
- Ability to clearly define and articulate problems before jumping to solutions
- Experience mapping user flows, etc.
- Data-literate: Can interpret analytics, define success metrics, and use data to prioritise decisions
- Understanding of how design decisions affect business and technical constraints
Communication & Client Skills:
- Excellent written and verbal communication - adapts tone for technical teams, executives, and end-users
- Confident facilitator across workshops, sprint ceremonies, client showcases, and design crits
- Active listener who asks precise, well-timed questions to clarify intent
- Comfortable challenging assumptions and pushing back constructively on bad briefs or scope creep
- Diplomatic but direct - can navigate differing opinions and land on decisions that move work forward
Agile & Delivery:
- Experienced working embedded in cross-functional agile squads
- Understands the sprint lifecycle and how to deliver design at the right fidelity for each stage
- Comfortable with ambiguity - can progress work with incomplete information and course-correct efficiently
- Proactively flags risks, dependencies, and blockers rather than waiting for them to escalate
EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS
- 4–7 years of professional product design experience (agency or in-house)
- Demonstrable experience in at least one of: Fintech, banking, insurance, payments - and/or medtech, health-tech, clinical platforms
- Portfolio showing end-to-end case studies with clear problem framing, process, and measurable outcomes
- Track record of working directly with clients or senior business stakeholders
- Experience designing for mobile (iOS/Android) and web; responsive design principles second nature
- Exposure to design system creation, governance, or significant contribution
- Familiarity with research tooling: Maze, Lyssna, Google Analytics, etc
Top Skills
What We Do
At Platform45 we promote ideation, we collaborate, we “iterate-iterate-iterate”, and above all, we build things that matter. More and more we are seeing software becoming an integral part of any business wanting to do better, grow faster, and offer their customers “one source of truth”. We know the power of incredible software and the potential it has to change the world, we’ve been at it since 2008 building platforms for fintech start-ups, mining giants, pioneering entrepreneurs and telecom companies. Behind our culture is an all encompassing passion to share the agony and the ecstacy in building our client’s vision. Our greatest stories started out as an idea and a dream. Those dreams became market leaders such as Howler and Resource Guru. Our name hints at ‘The Singularity’ - the moment that will trigger an explosion in technological advancement. It is our silent-nod to push the tech-envelope every single day. We want more for our clients and so we do more. Because we believe in the power of technology and its capacity to unleash change that can make the world a better place.
