Articulate

Senior Manager, Product Design

Articulate

full-time

Posted on:

Origin:  • 🇺🇸 United States

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Salary

💰 $184,200 - $276,200 per year

Job Level

Senior

About the role

  • Overall Impact
  • Lead a team of senior designers, coaching for craft, collaboration, influence, business impact, and career growth
  • Own the bar for usability and design quality across your team’s product area, ensuring solutions are usable, cohesive, and solve real customer problems
  • Partner with PM and Eng leads to coach the collaboration and discovery practices of multiple tripods
  • Drive clarity and focus across customer problem areas, reducing ambiguity and helping teams prioritize for impact
  • Actively shape design team systems, rituals, and practices as a peer to other functional leaders
  • Ensure that Product Design decisions align with company goals and drive measurable business outcomes.
  • Team Leadership & People Development
  • Coach senior ICs and leads to strengthen strategic thinking, decision-making, and cross-functional influence, shifting from directive guidance to growth
  • Support performance, growth, and strategic planning conversations while fostering adaptability and psychological safety
  • Help your team stay focused and aligned through ambiguity by modeling clarity, inclusivity, and resilient leadership
  • Play an active role in hiring and onboarding, while also anticipating future skill needs to scale a diverse, high-performing design team for evolving business demands
  • Design Quality & Usability Ownership
  • Define and uphold what "good" looks like across all stages of product development, especially around usability, simplicity, and polish
  • Review design work across discovery, delivery, and iteration to ensure strategic alignment, usability quality, and execution standards
  • Hold your team accountable for shipping trustworthy, valuable, and testable experiences that address real user needs and enable successful outcomes
  • Partner with Research and Data to ensure user insights guide design decisions and uncover usability gaps early
  • Tripod Collaboration & Coaching
  • Act as a peer coach to your area’s PM and Engineering leaders, helping tripods improve discovery, collaboration, and prioritization practices
  • Help empower Design in effectively owning usability as part of the tripod’s shared accountability for outcomes
  • Guide teams toward evidence-guided, assumption-testing workflows and avoid solution-first traps
  • Model how to align early on what "usable enough" means in testing, and instill effective usability testing and alignment practices ahead of key releases
  • Strategic Influence & Org Leadership
  • Help define team level strategy, especially during moments of ambiguity, change, or rapid growth
  • Represent Design in cross-functional leadership forums and collaborate to shape roadmap direction, team health, and delivery quality
  • Lead cross-team initiatives that evolve design standards, operational systems, and customer experience quality. Ensure continuity across the end-to-end customer journey
  • Support the evolution of planning, staffing, and rituals as we scale our design practice and shift toward outcome-focused product development

Requirements

  • 8+ years of product design experience, including 3–5 years in people management
  • Proven track record leading design teams through growth, change, and product discovery
  • Deep understanding of user-centered design principles and usability heuristics
  • Experience working in empowered product teams (e.g., tripods/trios) with ownership of outcomes
  • Excellent communicator and facilitator with ability to synthesize, align, and influence across disciplines
  • Passion for coaching, cross-functional collaboration, and user advocacy
  • Demonstrated ability to operate autonomously and provide strategic leadership in ambiguous or evolving contexts
  • Deep domain expertise within your product space
  • Ability to remain objective and identify solutions in the face of difficult dynamics, moments of ambiguity, or compressed timelines
  • Highly accountable and strong prioritization skills