Senior Manager, Product Design

Employment Type: [Not Specified] Location Type: [Not Specified] Salary: [Not Specified]

Position Overview

The Senior Manager, Product Design within the Technology department at LaunchDarkly is a pivotal role responsible for driving significant impact across their group and contributing to the overall success of the business. This position involves close collaboration with Engineering and Product Management leadership to shape the long-term vision, strategy, and definition of problem spaces across the group’s product-line experiences. The role directly influences business objectives through impactful design leadership. The teams reporting to this role include Ai Configurations, Feature Management + Enterprise, Growth, Developer Experience, and Design System. The Senior Manager will lead both the creative vision for their group and the product design team they manage, leveraging expertise that often spans multiple domains or functions. They are expected to be versatile and apply their craft and problem-solving skills to diverse challenges.

In addition to prioritizing a portfolio of work across a large team and cross-functional partners, this role encompasses managing, mentoring, hiring, and building a world-class product design team. It also involves creating annual and quarterly resource plans to optimize quality and coverage for the design 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, day-to-day coaching, and resource planning.
• Helps define hiring standards and practices, and actively participates in hiring and team building.
• Acts as a natural leader, capable of galvanizing teams around a shared vision and inspiring them to achieve the team's "North Star."
• Provides mentorship to designers at all levels.
• Regularly provides training and support for new methods, tools, and patterns.

Craft Skills (Depth and Growth of Design Skills)

• Demonstrates visionary capabilities, translating undefined ideas into actionable design frameworks and roadmaps.
• Possesses strong intuition, with an ability to anticipate users' unstated needs.
• Is an experienced storyteller who drives consensus and influences stakeholders through thoughtful, compelling visual narratives.
• Generates adaptable and extensible UX frameworks, encouraging other designers to think more flexibly and expansively.
• Considers and designs for experiences beyond the immediate product scope.
• Primary work product is design as a communication tool.
• Creates necessary specs, presentations, and documents to ensure clarity, alignment, and to assist other designers in execution.

Scope and Delivery

• Leads the creation of new product visions that can significantly impact business revenue.
• Proposes and prototypes new product areas with ease.
• Articulates strategy for emerging design and technology trends and their intersection with product and engineering.
• Leads product design across multiple areas of focus.
• Acts as an innovation leader by example, with other leaders and executives seeking out their expertise.
• Provides critical feedback at the systems and strategic level during early design planning.
• Elevates predictive market trends to inform strategic planning.
• Communicates design efforts effectively to senior leadership.
• Anticipates emerging issues and ensures their resolution.
• Serves in a senior consulting role on new products and future technologies, including market definition, business models, and core metrics targets at the company/product level.
• May lead or influence significant non-related groups or areas outside of their 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 the boundaries of solutions.