We're cooking up something tasty. Are you the Product Designer to help us serve it?

Introduction

Hey, I'm Igor.

I'm a designer here at Kanpla .

You can probably find a generic version of this job posting on LinkedIn, but I'd like to do something a little more involved and personal here.

If you're an experienced product designer (or a design engineer), read on as I pitch you what might just be the perfect role for you. If you know one, please forward this to them 🙏.

If none of the above applies, I've just wasted 30 seconds of your life that you'll never get back, sorry about that!

Igor Krizko

Product designer

What is Kanpla?

Learn a little bit about us

Unless you’re really into canteen software (hey, no judging if you are) or you’ve been closely following the Danish startup scene, chances are this is the first time you’ve heard about Kanpla.

We make software for the contract catering industry. Think company canteens, school cafeterias, coworking spaces.

We're well-funded, have stable revenue streams, and are growing fast (with churn pretty much non-existent). We're about 50 people now, up from ~30 just last year. If the trend continues, there should be four trillion of us in just 50 years.

Making the world a better place™

I want to start with a reality check: we're not curing cancer, and we're not putting people on Mars anytime soon (2026 Q1 roadmap is not yet locked in though). This is a B2B SaaS scale-up. But as those go, I really think Kanpla has a mission worth fighting for.

We make genuinely useful products. From a chef setting up tomorrow's menu to someone grabbing their lunch on the go, our work is woven into the daily routines of hundreds of thousands of people.

And behind all that, there's a deeper reason we do what we do. Roughly a third of all food produced globally is wasted, and canteens are a big contributor. Reducing food waste is one of the main reasons Kanpla exists.

Products

Our products span three connected families, each serving a different part of the ecosystem, with its own devices, users, and design principles.

• Sales & loyalty app

  What guests see. A white-label, mobile-first app where they explore menus, pre-order lunch, and collect loyalty points.

• POS & kitchen

  What happens on-site. It covers our Point of Sale and Kitchen Display System used by staff, as well as kiosks and Order Status Displays used by guests.

• Admin platform

  What managers run things from. A desktop-first, information-dense interface where they control locations, menus, pricing, and integrations.

How we work

Our R&D works in small product teams, led by PMs, guided by a roadmap but not buried under process. We plan, ship, learn, and repeat, without a calendar packed with recurring meetings.

Design works horizontally across teams. It's how we make sure every part of Kanpla feels like part of one system, not five different apps stitched together. It's also the only way it can work as we have three-ish product teams and two designers at the moment 😅. You'd be the third.

We don't really follow any formal design process framework. We try to do what makes sense given the task and the context. Sometimes that means exploring ideas with customers, often it's iterating on a high-fidelity prototype with a PM and a developer until it clicks. We want to review and refine our design process once you're with us and hope you'll have opinions there.

We design in Figma, but more and more find ourselves exploring ideas directly in code.

To give you a clearer picture of what you’d be working on, here’s some of what we’ve done recently:

• Redesigned school lunch ordering flows in our user-facing app
• Started building our Design System 2.0
• Created VAT management tools for different tax rules
• Designed a white-label kiosk experience (think McDonald's-style ordering)

AI is here!

AI is already an important part of how we work. We use LLMs every day to design, write, code, and ship faster. Designers can open PRs, tweak things directly, and explore ideas in code instead of waiting on someone else. Of course, you’ll get access to ChatGPT, Cursor, v0, and any other AI tools you need.

We’re also building AI into our products. Kanpla is the first in our space to launch real, customer-facing AI features. You can see a few of them in the video below.

No need to watch the whole thing, just skim it to get the idea

Remote work

You can work from our 🇩🇰 Aarhus HQ, offices in 🇩🇰 Copenhagen, 🇬🇧 London, 🇳🇱 Amsterdam, or literally anywhere else. To call us "remote-friendly" would be a gross understatement.

Being remote doesn’t make you an outsider here. Our CTO is remote too, and we’ve built Kanpla around async workflows, written communication, and trust. Twice a year we still get everyone together: once company-wide, once as smaller teams. Here’s us at the latest workation 👇

People

You’ll have to take my word for this I guess, but people at Kanpla are truly great. They’re smart, ambitious, curious, generous with their time, and kind to a fault. They care deeply about what they do and about helping others do it well.

Whatever your interests, you'll probably find a kindred spirit here. This is the set of interests taken from our internal wiki.

And here's another one of the languages we speak.

🇩🇰🇬🇧🇳🇴🇺🇸🇨🇿🇪🇸🇫🇷🇮🇹🇵🇹🇩🇪🇸🇰🇷🇴🇸🇪🇹🇳

I could do a few more of these, but copying from Notion tables is a pain and the AI summary thing trial just expired.

Who we're looking for

Now, a little bit about you

So, the actual role we’re hiring for is 🥁: hands-on, good old product design. It used to be called UX/UI design, until someone realized the business side actually matters when you’re designing software people are supposed to buy. You-ex-slash-you-eye never really rolled off the tongue anyway, so now we call ourselves product designers like we're all Sir Jony Ive.

You’ll work closely with product managers to understand problems, come up with solutions that balance the ideal and the feasible, and shape those into artifacts developers can ship. PMs bring the domain knowledge; you bring the craft — usability, clarity, and that extra bit of refinement that makes a product feel world-class.

Must-haves

There really is only one non-negotiable. As you’ve probably gathered from the above, you need to be able to actually design web and app interfaces. That’s it.

This is not a junior role. Coming up with good UX solutions quickly takes a kind of pattern recognition that comes only from doing it for a while. You’ve seen enough wrong turns to know which ones to skip.

Nice-to-haves

Beyond that one must-have, there are a few things we think would make you a great fit for the role. Definitely not a checklist you need to tick off.

• You love good design

  You care about design everywhere, not just in software. You have opinions about typefaces, chairs, cameras, and cities.

• You have a business-first mindset

  A product designer’s job is to make the product succeed. You understand tradeoffs. You think about outcomes, not just output.

• You’ve worked on B2B SaaS before

  You’ve built dashboards, forms, permission systems, and pricing logic. You’ve developed a mental library of ideas and patterns you can tap into when solving problems.

• You’ve been in a startup before

  You’re comfortable with speed, ambiguity, and figuring things out as you go. If you find peace in procedure, corporate ladders, and decks about decks, you might not like it here.

• You care about words

  Bad copy stands out to you, especially the LLM-slop kind. If you see any here, consider it a test. You’ve passed. You know that great UX starts with great writing.

• You can code

  More on that in a second.

Should designers code?

Ah, the age-old question! I think with recent advances in AI, the answer is shifting from “it depends” to “sure, why not?”

Figma and code are just tools. Each has its pros and cons, depending on what you’re trying to do. The biggest drawbacks of “designing in code” — the time it takes and the skills it requires — are shrinking fast. What used to take a day in React now takes minutes with the right helpers.

If you’ve never written a line of CSS in your life, we won’t hold that against you. All we ask is that you keep an open mind about learning whatever tools help you do your best work.

FAQ

Maybe not F but definitely Q

• Where is this role based?

• What’s the salary?

• Do I need a traditional portfolio?

• What level is this role?

• What (design) tools do you use?