Send Freshworks Monday — Priority Queue, August 10
Six live signals this week across Headway, Freshworks, Adobe, HackerOne, Gusto, and Babylist. Only one Act Now entry is a straight race against an assembling candidate pool. The rest ask you either to resolve a pipeline question by asking it, or to time a contact to an org change before any role exists. Freshworks' new CPTO starts tomorrow, and that is the fastest-decaying item in the issue. Headway's Staff Product Designer posting is five days old with a VP who has publicly asked people to reach out. Send Freshworks Monday. Sequence the rest from there.
Send Freshworks Monday — Priority Queue, August 10
Six live signals this week across Headway, Freshworks, Adobe, HackerOne, Gusto, and Babylist. Only one Act Now entry is a straight race against an assembling candidate pool. The rest ask you either to resolve a pipeline question by asking it, or to time a contact to an org change before any role exists. Freshworks' new CPTO starts tomorrow, and that is the fastest-decaying item in the issue. Headway's Staff Product Designer posting is five days old with a VP who has publicly asked people to reach out. Send Freshworks Monday. Sequence the rest from there.
Signal Watch — OpenAI Breaks Months of Silence. Three Windows Close Wednesday.
OpenAI posted two product design roles on August 6 — first qualifying signal there in months, $245K–$310K, SF. Headway put out three provider-journey roles in seventeen hours, one naming agentic workflows outright. Both are inside their hot windows. Three signals expire Wednesday: Gusto's Head of Design and Capital One's Card Servicing Director cross 21 days, Headway's Group Practices hits Ignore. Anything you want to send on those goes Monday or Tuesday. Seven Act companies this cycle, up from four.
Signal Watch — OpenAI Breaks Months of Silence. Three Windows Close Wednesday.
OpenAI posted two product design roles on August 6 — first qualifying signal there in months, $245K–$310K, SF. Headway put out three provider-journey roles in seventeen hours, one naming agentic workflows outright. Both are inside their hot windows. Three signals expire Wednesday: Gusto's Head of Design and Capital One's Card Servicing Director cross 21 days, Headway's Group Practices hits Ignore. Anything you want to send on those goes Monday or Tuesday. Seven Act companies this cycle, up from four.
Thirty-Six Scored, Three Act, Twenty on the Wire
Three companies outside your core 35 posted roles in the last week that score Act — all three involve designing the surface between an autonomous agent and a human deciding whether to trust what it did. Your Agentic Labs cases and trust essay are published proof of this problem. Thirty-six companies cleared screening across VC portfolio boards, aggregators, and direct career pages. Thirteen Watch. Twenty on the monitoring bench with named triggers. Two of the three Act signals are under seven days old with outreach angles ready for Monday morning.
Thirty-Six Scored, Three Act, Twenty on the Wire
Three companies outside your core 35 posted roles in the last week that score Act — all three involve designing the surface between an autonomous agent and a human deciding whether to trust what it did. Your Agentic Labs cases and trust essay are published proof of this problem. Thirty-six companies cleared screening across VC portfolio boards, aggregators, and direct career pages. Thirteen Watch. Twenty on the monitoring bench with named triggers. Two of the three Act signals are under seven days old with outreach angles ready for Monday morning.
The Dormant 100, Filed by Move Type
The prior dormant list named each trigger. This update adds a routing decision: when the trigger fires, are you shaping the role or competing for it? Shape moves reward early contact with a thesis about what the design function needs. Compete moves reward portfolio precision and speed. Three boundary cases have Shape windows cracked open right now — Cohere (new product-and-design leader, month one), Freshworks (CPTO starting August 10), HappyRobot ($150M Series C five days ago). The other 97 are scored, clustered, and filed with the specific trigger that would move each from Ignore to your outreach queue.
The Dormant 100, Filed by Move Type
The prior dormant list named each trigger. This update adds a routing decision: when the trigger fires, are you shaping the role or competing for it? Shape moves reward early contact with a thesis about what the design function needs. Compete moves reward portfolio precision and speed. Three boundary cases have Shape windows cracked open right now — Cohere (new product-and-design leader, month one), Freshworks (CPTO starting August 10), HappyRobot ($150M Series C five days ago). The other 97 are scored, clustered, and filed with the specific trigger that would move each from Ignore to your outreach queue.
The Dormant 100, Filed by the Design Problem You'd Solve
100 companies that clear the rubric but carry no live hiring signal. Nine moved to the active list since the last inventory — Zoox, Atlassian, Cohere, Suno, and five others. What remains is reorganized by the design problem you'd be hired to solve: agent trust, clinical decisions, financial authorization, security operations, physical autonomy, and five more clusters. Each entry is pre-scored, portfolio-matched, and trigger-defined. When a name surfaces in a funding round or a recruiter ping, pull up the entry and move in 48 hours instead of starting research from scratch.
The Dormant 100, Filed by the Design Problem You'd Solve
100 companies that clear the rubric but carry no live hiring signal. Nine moved to the active list since the last inventory — Zoox, Atlassian, Cohere, Suno, and five others. What remains is reorganized by the design problem you'd be hired to solve: agent trust, clinical decisions, financial authorization, security operations, physical autonomy, and five more clusters. Each entry is pre-scored, portfolio-matched, and trigger-defined. When a name surfaces in a funding round or a recruiter ping, pull up the entry and move in 48 hours instead of starting research from scratch.