Senior Manager, Product Design

Responsibilities

• Lead product and UX design across assigned product areas or value streams, aligning teams around shared customer, employee, franchisee, product, operational, and business outcomes.
• Shape experience and product direction with cross-functional partners by framing opportunities, challenging assumptions, translating evidence into recommendations, and influencing roadmaps and investment decisions.
• Manage, coach, and develop a distributed and matrixed team of designers, including employees and contractors, through clear expectations, candid feedback, career development, and meaningful delegation.
• Serve as a player-coach, prioritizing people and portfolio leadership while contributing directly when senior design expertise will materially improve a priority outcome, resolve ambiguity, or address a critical capacity gap.
• Establish clear portfolio and delivery plans, including outcomes, priorities, ownership, milestones, dependencies, capacity, risks, decisions, and success measures.
• Maintain transparent visibility, surface risks early, and recommend practical trade-offs when scope, timing, quality, or available capacity are in conflict.
• Raise the quality and consistency of design work by enabling effective critique and review practices and ensuring Design remains engaged through refinement, launch, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with UX Research and Analytics to identify the evidence needed for decisions and translate findings into clear design implications, recommendations, and follow-up actions.
• Promote consistent adoption of enterprise design systems, shared patterns, accessibility practices, content standards, and design documentation within assigned value streams.
• Strengthen team capability through coaching, role clarity, career development, shared standards, learning, and continuous improvement of design practices.
• Advance the responsible use of AI across design by identifying high-value opportunities, evaluating impact on quality and efficiency, and helping the team adopt effective practices without outsourcing customer understanding, design judgment, or accountability.
• Manage external design resources and contribute to staffing forecasts, estimates, budget inputs, and continuity plans for assigned work.

Qualifications

• Minimum: 4 yr degree
• 10+ years of experience in product design, UX design, interaction design, service design, or a related field, including at least 3 years leading people and complex digital product or experience programs.
• Experience leading design across multiple product areas or value streams in a matrixed product and technology organization.
• Demonstrated success developing designers, influencing cross-functional leaders, and balancing customer needs, business goals, delivery realities, and design quality.
• A strong portfolio or body of work showing product and UX design leadership, current craft judgment, evidence-informed decision-making, and thoughtful application of AI within design work or product experiences.