Manager, Product Design & Research

Role Overview: As Ottimate scales, maintaining an intuitive, powerful, and consistent user experience is crucial. The company is seeking a dedicated design leader in India to oversee the Product Design team, consisting of 3 Designers. In this role, you will play a key part in elevating the design quality, institutionalizing user research, and leading complex design projects. Your responsibility will be to shape the future look, feel, and usability of the platform to ensure design serves as a strategic business advantage. Key Responsibilities: - Design Leadership & Mentorship: - Manage, coach, and offer constructive feedback to the Product Design team to promote a culture of design excellence and technical execution. - Enhance design quality across all features, maintaining consistency, usability, and robust information architecture. - Drive the hiring and development pipeline to scale the design team strategically as Ottimate expands. - Design Systems & Operations (Player Function): - Act as a Player-Coach by personally overseeing key design artifacts, such as establishing a company-wide Design System. - Define and standardize DesignOps processes, including file hygiene, component governance, and design-to-engineering handoff workflows. - User Research & Strategy: - Plan, conduct, and synthesize comprehensive user research (interviews, usability testing, surveys) to derive strategic insights guiding product and design decisions for the India-focused teams. - Advocate for the value of research and data-informed design within the broader product and engineering organization. - Design Advocacy & Collaboration: - Promote a robust design culture, advocating for the user in strategic roadmap discussions. - Collaborate closely with Product Managers and Engineering Leads to ensure designs are technically feasible, delivered efficiently, and align with business objectives. Qualifications Required: - 7+ years of product design experience, showcasing work on complex B2B or FinTech/SaaS applications. - Proven track record of managing and mentoring a team of Product Designers or leading cross-functional design projects. - Strong proficiency in user research methodologies and utilizing research to steer strategic design decisions. - Exceptional skills in high-fidelity prototyping and design specification. - Effective executive-level communication abilities to inspire and lead a remote or hybrid team. - Preferably located in Bangalore or Chennai.,