- Manage and develop a team of product designers across one or more product areas : setting expectations, running regular 1 : 1s, delivering honest feedback, and building individualized growth plans.

- Own the quality of design output from your team.

- You review work, lead critiques, and ensure what ships meets the standard, not just the deadline.

- Drive problem-solving across your team's portfolio.

- You help designers frame problems well, navigate ambiguity, and make good trade-offs under real constraints.

- Partner with Product Management and Engineering leadership to align design investment with product priorities.

- You're in the room where scope, sequence, and trade-offs are decided.

- Build and support a high-functioning team : hiring well, onboarding deliberately, creating psychological safety, and holding people accountable to high standards at the same time.

- Champion design system adoption within your team and ensure designers contribute back patterns and learnings that strengthen the broader system.

- Model the team's values and operating principles in how you lead, communicate, and make decisions, especially in challenging situations.

- Connect your team's impact to organizational strategy.

- You can articulate why the work matters in business terms, not just design terms.

What You Bring :

- 6 to 10 years of product design experience, with at least 2 years in a people management role leading designers in enterprise or B2B SaaS environments.

- Strong design craft and judgment.

- You don't need to be the best individual contributor on the team, but you need to know great work when you see it and be able to coach toward it.

- Experience building and maintaining high-performing teams : hiring, onboarding, developing talent, managing performance, and creating a culture where people do their best work.

- Ability to balance people leadership with delivery.

- You care about your team's growth and you care about shipping quality work on time.

- You don't sacrifice one for the other.

- AI fluency that extends into how you lead.

- You build AI into your team's practices, not as a mandate but as a standard.

- You coach designers on quality judgment when working with AI tools : when AI accelerates the work, when it produces generic output, and how to maintain craft standards regardless of how the work is produced.

- You model this in your own critiques and reviews.

- Clear, strategic communication.

- You align stakeholders, present team progress to leadership, and advocate for design investment with business rationale.

- Familiarity with design systems and how to drive adoption across a team without creating rigidity.

What Could Set You Apart :

- Strong management craft and design judgment are the floor.

- What separates candidates is how you're preparing your team for a discipline that's changing faster than most managers acknowledge.

- You've built AI fluency programs or practices within a design team.

- Not theoretical frameworks, but real changes to how your team works : new tools in the workflow, new quality criteria in critique, new expectations in hiring.

- You understand AI infrastructure well enough to help your team design for it : agent-driven workflows, MCP-style protocols, context-aware systems.

- You translate technical architecture into design implications for your team.

- You think about what AI means for the design management role itself.

- How does coaching change when a junior designer can generate 50 layouts in an hour? How do you evaluate craft when the production method is opaque? You have a point of view on these questions.

- A pragmatic, fail-fast disposition that you model for your team.

- You create the conditions for experimentation : low-stakes ways to try new tools, new processes, new approaches, and you extract learning from what doesn't work.

- Experience in enterprise domains like manufacturing, distribution, supply chain, or retail operations.