Product Design Manager, Vertical Experiences

The Opportunity

You will manage and mentor a pod of four product designers covering BetterUp’s core coaching experiences across member, partner, and coach surfaces. This is a player-coach role—you run design operations for your pod while maintaining craft standards across your area.

Your pod owns four interconnected surface areas: Partner experience (Partner Hub, Performance Intelligence, and Buyer), Individual coaching (Manage, Lead, and Ready), Group coaching (Dare to Lead, Guided Journey, and Team tooling), and Coach experience (the professional platform coaches use to manage their practice).

• Each requires a different design lens, and your job is to ensure coherence and quality across all of them.

What You'll Do

• Manage and develop four direct reports across multiple time zones, with consistent 1:1s, actionable feedback, and individualized growth support
• Run design operations for your pod: review cadence, Figma hygiene, handoff standards, and sprint participation
• Ensure design is in the room at kickoff—before the PRD is written, not after
• Enforce sign-off gates before work moves to engineering, maintaining quality and consistency across your surfaces
• Partner directly with VP Product counterparts for Partner, Coach, and Member pods to align on priorities and tradeoffs
• Surface experience quality issues across your surfaces and bring them to weekly design review
• Maintain craft standards as a player-coach—you are still a designer, not just a manager; taste and collaboration with growth, core, AI, and design systems teams matter

What You'll Bring

• 7+ years of product design experience, including people management experience
• Experience managing product designers across multiple product areas simultaneously
• Strong systems thinking—the surfaces you own span B2B, B2C, and two-sided interactions
• A track record of getting design upstream, not just executing on PM direction
• Comfort operating without perfect information in a fast-moving environment
• Player-coach mindset—craft and taste are as important as management skills
• Proficiency with Figma and modern design tools; familiarity with prototyping and design systems workflows
• Experience with AI-powered design tools and workflows (e.g., AI-assisted prototyping, generative design, AI-powered user research analysis)

Benefits

• Access to BetterUp coaching; one for you and one for a friend or family member
• A competitive compensation plan with opportunity for advancement
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible paid time off
• All federal/statutory holidays observed
• 4 BetterUp Inner Workdays
• 5 Volunteer Days to give back
• Learning and Development stipend
• Company wide Summer & Winter breaks
• Year-round charitable contribution of your choice on behalf of BetterUp
• 401(k) self contribution

Pay

This role's base salary range is as follows:

• New York City and San Francisco: $210,000 - $260,000
• Austin and Arlington: $190,000 - $238,000

Schedule

N/A