Product Design Manager

What Youll Do

• Manage and develop a team of product designers across one or more product areas: setting expectations, running regular 1:1s, delivering honest feedback, and building individualized growth plans.
• Own the quality of design output from your team. You review work, lead critiques, and ensure what ships meets the standard, not just the deadline.
• Drive problem-solving across your teams portfolio. You help designers frame problems well, navigate ambiguity, and make good trade-offs under real constraints.
• Partner with Product Management and Engineering leadership to align design investment with product priorities. Youre in the room where scope, sequence, and trade-offs are decided.
• Build and support a high-functioning team: hiring well, onboarding deliberately, creating psychological safety, and holding people accountable to high standards at the same time.
• Champion design system adoption within your team and ensure designers contribute back patterns and learnings that strengthen the broader system.
• Model the teams values and operating principles in how you lead, communicate, and make decisions, especially in challenging situations.
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  Connect your teams impact to organizational strategy. You can articulate why the work matters in business terms, not just design terms.

What You Bring

• 6–10 years of product design experience, with at least 2 years in a people management role leading designers in enterprise or B2B SaaS environments.
• Strong design craft and judgment. You dont need to be the best individual contributor on the team, but you need to know great work when you see it and be able to coach toward it.
• Experience building and maintaining high-performing teams: hiring, onboarding, developing talent, managing performance, and creating a culture where people do their best work.
• Ability to balance people leadership with delivery. You care about your teams growth and you care about shipping quality work on time. You dont sacrifice one for the other.
• AI fluency that extends into how you lead. You build AI into your teams practices, not as a mandate but as a standard. You coach designers on quality judgment when working with AI tools: when AI accelerates the work, when it produces generic output, and how to maintain craft standards regardless of how the work is produced. You model this in your own critiques and reviews.
• Clear, strategic communication. You align stakeholders, present team progress to leadership, and advocate for design investment with business rationale.
• Familiarity with design systems and how to drive adoption across a team without creating rigidity.

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What Could Set You Apart

Strong management craft and design judgment are the floor. What separates candidates is how youre preparing your team for a discipline thats changing faster than most managers acknowledge.

• Youve built AI fluency programs or practices within a design team. Not theoretical frameworks, but real changes to how your team works: new tools in the workflow, new quality criteria in critique, new expectations in hiring.
• You understand AI infrastructure well enough to help your team design for it: agent-driven workflows, MCP-style protocols, context-aware systems. You translate technical architecture into design implications for your team.
• You think about what AI means for the design management role itself. How does coaching change when a junior designer can generate 50 layouts in an hour How do you evaluate craft when the production method is opaque You have a point of view on these questions.
• A pragmatic, fail-fast disposition that you model for your team. You create the conditions for experimentation: low-stakes ways to try new tools, new processes, new approaches, and you extract learning from what doesnt work.
• Experience in enterprise domains like manufacturing, distribution, supply chain, or retail operations.