Product Design Manager, Help Platform | Internal Tools

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. 

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 team

The Help Platform team is a horizontal team dedicated to crafting dynamic and personalized customer self-service capabilities within our products by leveraging AI, chat, help documentation, tutorials, and demos. When a customer needs to contact Support, this team is responsible for designing a seamless end-to-end experience, from initial contact to issue resolution. Providing a seamless end-to-end Customer Support experience extends beyond our product. It encompasses the ability to enable cohesive and intuitive experiences for the tools that Support relies on to accurately and effectively serve our customers.

About the opportunity

As the Product Design Manager for the Help Platform team, you’ll lead a small team of two (2) product designers to craft high quality and intuitive platform and service experiences for the range of customers we serve. This role is for someone who wants to lean into their strategic and leadership acumen, but is obsessed with building themselves. You’ll leverage service design expertise to craft cohesive end-to-end service experiences for our customers, and will be responsible for taking a platform approach to crafting highly effective self-serve product and tooling experiences. You’ll work closely with the various product teams who will leverage the experiences you create: our Experience Platform and Design Systems teams, Customer Support, Biztech, and documentation writers. You’ll be accountable for driving the vision for how we leverage cutting-edge technology such as AI, and ultimately, the vision for an optimal customer service experience. 

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Craft the end-to-end journeys and develop frameworks, patterns and principles that will be used to help our teams deliver world-class service experiences.
• Empower a small team of product designers, creating the conditions for them to do work they’re proud of and that serves the needs of our customers. 
• Work with cross-functional partners in Product Management, Engineering, Data Science, Design, and Customer Support to understand customer problems and identify key opportunities for the customer and our business. 
• 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, our Design System, and net-new platform capabilities.
• Speak clearly to tradeoffs and the “Why” behind design decisions in terms non-designers can understand and participate in.
• Collaborate with designers and design leaders on other teams to develop cohesive solutions for shared problems.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 8+ years' Product Design experience, ideally with two of those in management, and with experience worki