Design Program Manager, Design Foundations

Company Description

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, built to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Our products help people make powerful connections, discover exciting opportunities, build necessary skills, and gain valuable insights every day. We’re also committed to providing transformational opportunities for our own employees by investing in their growth. We aspire to create a culture that’s built on trust, care, inclusion, and fun – where everyone can succeed.

Join us to transform the way the world works.

Job Description

This role will be based in Mountain View, San Francisco or New York.

At LinkedIn, our approach to flexible work is centered on trust and optimized for culture, connection, clarity, and the evolving needs of our business. The work location of this role is hybrid, meaning it will be performed both from home and from a LinkedIn office on select days, as determined by the business needs of the team.

LinkedIn’s vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Our global Product Design team advances this vision through quality, inclusive design. We're passionate about designing an equal, fair, and accessible platform that’s modern, engaging, and responsible.

Our products help professionals all over the world stay connected, informed, and productive. The LinkedIn ecosystem is about more than just job hunting. We create and support active communities and enterprise products around sales, marketing, learning, and recruiting.

As a Design Program Manager within the Design Foundations organization at LinkedIn, you’ll connect the dots across our product ecosystem, supporting the horizontal teams that ensure we deliver high-quality, cohesive experiences anywhere a member or customer engages with LinkedIn. You’ll be responsible for championing processes in order to help the team of specialists scale their knowledge and build impactful experiences across the company. You're equally at home explaining your team’s goals and recommendations to executives as you are discussing the technical trade-offs in product development with engineers and product managers. A successful Design Program Manager leverages deep application/platform knowledge, in combination with business and project management domain expertise, to drive a successful program. You are comfortable communicating on behalf of your team to scope new projects, lead teams, manage expectations, inspire collaboration, escalate risks, and report on performance. 

Responsibilities  

• Build strong relationships with designers and specialists in delivering work in a way that builds trust with crossfunctional partners and executives. 
• Drive programs that help develop and maintain transparency, collaboration, and communication with partners and stakeholders.
• Build, manage, and/or identify operational improvements to creative workflows in order to deliver high-quality products and features through the project lifecycle while delivering on goals and objectives and user experience value. 
• Lead or collaborate with Design Foundations leadership in key project decision-making, including: requirements gathering, scheduling, resource allocation, team motivation/celebration, outreach, and coordination of teams and approval processes. 
• Help stakeholders across adjacent business lines and departments define opportunities to closer integrate LinkedIn products and ensure a cohesive user experience (Product, Brand, Engineering, Research). 
• Partner with TPM, Product Managers, Design Managers, and Researchers to maintain the team’s program schedule that consolidates individual project track plans, reflects cross-track dependencies, and eliminates redundancies among the tracks.
• Manage program risks and drive issue resolution as it relates to meeting the overall schedule and quality commitments. 
• Partner with your team’s leads to develop the strategic vision and help build an innovative, world-class roadmap of features and services that support our vision and values.
• Work with stakeholders throughout the org to help define business needs, requirements, investment priorities and product features. 
• Direct the evolution of the team’s process through continuous risk and optimization assessments. 
• Identify team needs with regards to process, tools, documentation, etc., and implement or drive required changes to make sure designers are working at optimum efficiency. 
• Advocate that the member’s voice is heard in all product and user experience processes. 
• Represent and advocate for the team’s priorities during the development process, including release planning, user story grooming and backlog management. 
• For high visibility projects, own schedules and task assignments for your team of designers -