Senior Product Design Manager, Core Experiences

About Gusto

Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 400,000 businesses nationwide.

Our mission is to create a world where work empowers a better life, and it starts right here at Gusto. That’s why we’re committed to building a collaborative and inclusive workplace, both physically and virtually. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy. 

About Gusto 

Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 300,000 businesses nationwide.

Our mission is to create a world where work empowers a better life, and it starts right here at Gusto. That’s why we’re committed to building a collaborative and inclusive workplace, both physically and virtually. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy. 

About the team
Product Design at Gusto is made up of over 60 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We’re a cross-functional bunch focused on Design, Research, Writing, Ops and Front-end Development who are always looking for opportunities to build understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto. We don’t care a whole lot about swim lanes and we work closely with our partners in Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to design, build and ship experiences that make a difference. We are passionate advocates for thoughtful, crafted, and inclusive experiences and we believe great design can make hard things possible, even delightful. Read more about Design at Gusto.

About the opportunity

As a Product Designer Manager for our Core Experiences platform, you’ll be responsible for operating in a player-coach capacity, responsible for designing and building our core experience platform including: common experiences like the employee lifecycle, reporting, roles and permissions, communications platform, and more. 

This role will also cover part of our senior leadership responsibilities while our design lead is on a parental leave, and will be our acting design lead at the senior quartet level, stewarding our design vision across the Platform. During this leave, you will have five direct reports who you will work collaboratively with to build cohesive, simple user experiences that scale. 

As a senior design leader, you will also have the opportunity to work closely with our Principal Designer, stewarding a lot of the design vision across our Platform. Although your primary job is to empower your team and align with key cross functional partners in product management and engineering, you will also take on projects as an individual contributor to build deep domain expertise and unblock your team.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Work with cross-functional partners in Product Management, Engineering, and Data Science to understand customer problems and identify key opportunities for the customer and our business. You’ll be the design representative on the senior quartet. 
• Empower a small deal of product designers, creating the conditions for them to do work they’re proud of and that serves the needs of our customers. 
• Craft the end-to-end journeys and develop frameworks and principles that can be used to help align our teams on the right experiences.
• Collaborate with other key teams and stakeholders at Gusto such as Legal, Compliance, Risk Operations, Customer Support, and other various product owners. 
• Ensure that proposed solutions are customer-informed through research, data, and insights from our Customer Support team.
• Balance an iterative approach and urgency to solve customer pain with ensuring that short term improvements ladder up to long-term vision and meet a high bar for the customer experience.
• Hold high standards for the customer experience, including partnering with engineering partners to refine the end customer experience and ensure that what we release is bug free, performant, accessible, and responsive.
• Design and advocate for cohesive experiences. through the use of Workbench, o