Design Manager

• Demonstrate a proven approach to discovering and mapping user needs, experiences, and customer user journeys.
• Advocate for user-centered design by prioritizing user research and data-driven insights over subjective feedback, ensuring design decisions are rooted in user needs and behaviors.
• Act as a champion and advocate for good user experience, sharing best practices and demonstrating curiosity about customer needs and behaviors.
• Wear many hats whether undertaking Design Research activities with customers, reviewing designs with the team, defining micro-interactions, or crafting UI components for our design system.
  

• Ability to undertake thoughtful, iterative user research to validate product concepts and hypotheses early and frequently, with or without the support of a dedicated researcher.
• Skilled at transforming research insights into practical design solutions, determining ideal timing, and maximizing the impact of research efforts.
• Effectively utilize user research findings and usage metrics to guide and improve design decisions.

People Management:

• Provide clear guidance, inspiration, mentorship, coaching, feedback, and advocate for both craft and career development of the designers you manage. Help designers develop a wide array of hard and soft skills based on their career goals and what the team needs.
• Establish clear ways to break down, track, and communicate the work and progress of your reports, ensuring alignment with goals, product priorities, and design timelines.
• Proactively lead design feedback sessions to ensure alignment on product and customer objectives, leveraging user research insights to facilitate and promote constructive critique of design work.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, engineers, content strategists, designers, and researchers to refine, iterate on, and validate design solutions.
• Positively shape design team culture through collaboration and continuous process improvement.
  

Mindset and Attention to Detail:

• Balance high design standards with a practical ability to monitor workstreams, helping the team stay productive and unblocked.
  
• Maintain a high bar for usability, accessibility (WCAG), beauty, quality, and consistency by applying best practice design UCD principles and adhering to our design system.
  
• Help to accelerate team efficiency by improving processes and workflows within the design team and broader cross-functional teams.
  
• Sweat the small stuff understand that the little details are what make people love a product.
  
• Be a big-picture thinker connect the dots as part of a larger system and broader product ecosystem considering consistency and usability.
  
• Stay current with emerging tools and techniques, including AI-powered design tools, to optimize team workflows and amplify design output.