Product Designer - Boater at The Wanderlust Group, Inc. – Newport, Rhode Island

About Dockwa

Boating is changing. A new generation expects seamless digital experiences—the ability to discover marinas, book slips, manage payments, and plan trips from their phone.

Dockwa makes boating more accessible, more spontaneous, and more connected. We are the first mate to over 400,00 boaters nationwide, helping them plan trips, book reservations, pay for marina goods and services, and manage their essential boating documents, all from one convenient app.

About the role

As Product Designer for the Dockwa Boater App, you'll own the mobile experience that hundreds of thousands of boaters use to manage their time on the water.

This role reports directly to the VP of Product and represents Dockwa's first dedicated consumer product designer. You'll establish design foundations for our boater experience: building native mobile design patterns (iOS/Android), conducting user research with boaters, and creating membership and subscription experiences that drive growth and retention.

Core responsibilities

• Design native mobile experiences for iOS and Android across boater discovery, booking, membership, and community features. Optimize for on-the-go contexts like offline states and one-handed use.
• Create and optimize membership and subscription experiences that drive growth: compelling sign-up and onboarding flows, retention features, and upgrade gates.
• Build and maintain Dockwa's mobile design system with reusable components, patterns, and guidelines that work across iOS and Android
• Lead user research with boaters in partnership with Product - boater interviews, marina visits, boat shows, on-water testing - and translate insights into actionable design decisions
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Go to Market to align on priorities, communicate design rationale, and balance user needs with business constraints and technical feasibility

• 5-10 years of consumer product design experience with portfolio demonstrating polished mobile app work
• Strong native mobile app design expertise for iOS and Android platforms
• Deep understanding of platform-specific design patterns, conventions, and guidelines
• Strong UX research skills with proven ability to independently own the full research process
• Experience building and maintaining mobile design systems
• Proficiency with modern design tools (Figma required) and AI-powered design capabilities
• Portfolio showing consumer-facing applications with focus on delight and ease-of-use

• Membership or subscription product design: sign-up flows, account management, retention features, paywalls
• Mobile-specific challenges: touch targets, gestures, offline states, push notifications, loading patterns
• Discovery and search experiences: filtering, sorting, map-based interfaces
• Booking or reservation flows in consumer apps
• Experience at consumer-first companies focused on mobile (Airbnb, Uber, Strava, AllTrails, ClassPass)
• Travel, hospitality, or outdoor recreation product experience
• Marketplace design (understanding both supply and demand sides)

Dockwa is a lean, fast-moving team. People succeed here when they:

• Are high-agency: You don't wait for perfect specs or complete information. You identify problems, propose solutions, prototype ideas, and drive outcomes.
• Get their hands dirty: You test with real boaters. You visit marinas. You build prototypes. You ship and iterate.
• Embrace ownership: You own the boater experience end-to-end. When designs don't land as expected, you iterate and improve.
• Balance craft with speed: You know when to polish and when to ship and learn. You sweat the details that matter and move fast on the rest.Challenge ideas, then commit: You bring your perspective, debate vigorously in design reviews, and then fully support the decision

We are a small team that is winning. We intentionally preserve a lean organization because we want people at the source of problems with clear ownership and autonomy.

We move fast. Context is something we try to give but it doesn't always land perfectly. It's always okay to ask why. Over time, the trust battery goes up.

Everything is solvable. But not everything should be solved. We hate context switching. We'd rather keep people deep in a problem than abandon cart—but we won't chase bad bets for the sake of it.

We have a remarkably good group of humans here. There are no rules or roads where we're going—which makes it damn fun to take the pen and shape the next few turns.

• Competitive base salary ($140K-$180K depending on experience and location)
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family
• Flexible, remote-friendly work environment (Newport, RI headquarters with regular on-site collaboration opportunities)
• Regular opportunities to spend time with users—marina visits, boat shows, on-water user testing
• A team that values transparency, direct communication, and doing the work