Senior Manager, Product Design

About the Job:

The Senior Manager, Product Design within the Technology department at LaunchDarkly plays a critical role in driving impact across their group in service of the success of the business. This role collaborates with Engineering and Product Management leadership partners on the long term vision, strategy and definition of problem spaces spanning across the group’s product-line experiences, resulting in meaningful impact on business objectives. The teams they’ll be leading include: Ai Configurations, Feature Management + Enterprise, Growth, Developer Experience and Design System. They help drive both the creative vision for their group and the design team that they manage. Their expertise often spans multiple domains or functions. They are versatile, and are able to apply their craft and problem solving skills to diverse problems.

In addition to the prioritization of a portfolio of work across a large team with their cross functional partners, they also manage, mentor, hire and build a world-class product design team and create annual and quarterly resource plans to maximize quality and coverage for the discipline within the group.

Responsibilities:

• Leadership (Management, Mentoring, Influence)

  • Serves as a standard bearer for Design within the broader organization.

  • Manages a team of 5 product designers within their focus area. Responsible for career and performance management as well as day to day coaching and resource planning. 

  • Helps define hiring standards and practices as well as hiring and building the team as necessary. 

  • Natural leader who can galvanize the team(s) around a shared vision, inspiring others to charge forward in support and realization of the team's "North Star". 

  • Provides mentorship to all levels of designers.

  • Regularly provides training and support for new methods, tools, patterns.

• Craft Skills (Depth and Growth of Design Skills)

  • Visionary who can translate undefined ideas into an actionable design framework / roadmap.

  • Intuitive, with a strong ability to predict and anticipate user's unstated needs.

  • Experienced storyteller who drives consensus and influences through thoughtful, compelling visual narratives.

  • Generates adaptable and extensible UX frameworks, pushing other designers to think more flexibly and expansively. 

  • Considers the experience outside of the immediate product and designs for that. 

  • Main work product is design as communication.

  • Creates specs, presentations, documents as needed to create clarity and alignment or help other designers execute.

• Scope and Delivery 

  • Leads the creation of new product visions that can have a meaningful impact on business revenue. 

  • Can propose and prototype new product areas with ease.

  • Articulates strategy for emerging design/technology and its intersection with product and engineering.

  • ​​Leads product design across multiple areas of focus. 

  • Innovation leader by example. Other leaders and executives in the company seek out your expertise. 

  • Critical feedback at the systems/strategic level in early design planning. 

  • Elevates predictive market trends, affecting strategic planning. 

  • Communicates design efforts to senior leaders. 

  • Expected to anticipate emerging issues and ensure that they are handled.

  • Serves in senior consulting role on new products and future technologies, including market definition, business model, and core metrics targets at the company/product level. 

  • May lead/influence significant non-related groups or areas outside of the individual’s area of functional expertise 

• Process and Design Thinking (Judgment, Iteration, Facilitation, Independence) 

  • Facilitates brainstorms, ideation sessions, design thinking workshops, design sprints, and other activities with partners within their product line, extended teams, and company leadership.

  • Pushes boundaries of a solution; raises the bar for design work. Looks for improvements to "The way it's always been done".

  • Anticipates needs for cross-product integrations and advocates for roadmap work to achieve them.

• Collaboration and Communication

  • Peer to other company leaders; acts as a strategic thought-partner and conduit on behalf of the design team.

  • Supports leaders and members of a team through design pairing and reviews.

  • Serves as the main point of contact for a product or project a