Design Program Manager

Responsibilities

• Build and run Product Design's core operating cadence, including weekly status, critiques, design reviews, quarterly planning, and decision follow-through.
• Create lightweight systems that make priorities, milestones, dependencies, risks, and ownership clear across multiple product areas.
• Establish practical engagement models between Design and Product, Engineering, Research, and Data so teams know when and how to work together.
• Improve launch readiness by helping teams surface quality risks, clarify tradeoffs, and understand what is ready to ship.
• Partner with design systems leaders to strengthen craft rituals, shared standards, and adoption of reusable patterns across product teams.
• Give design leadership better visibility into capacity, resourcing pressure, delivery risks, and operational bottlenecks as the org grows.
• Reduce recurring fire drills and low-level project wrangling by turning ad hoc coordination into repeatable workflows.
• Partner with the centralized program management office and Product/Engineering operations while representing the needs of Product Design.
• Serve as the operational backbone of Research, owning consent management and incentive processing to enable researchers to run concurrent programs at scale.
• Help bridge multiple time zones (PST, EST and IST) and management levels to optimize for visibility of design team work.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in design program management, design operations, product operations, technical program management, or a related role supporting product/design/engineering teams.
• Experience in a high-growth product environment where priorities shift quickly and process needs to serve the work, not dominate it.
• Deep understanding of product design to improve critiques, reviews, design quality rituals, and delivery workflows without being the design decision-maker.
• Excellent at turning ambiguity into operating clarity: agendas, decision logs, milestone plans, dependency maps, status systems, escalation paths, and practical rituals.
• Ability to build trust with designers while being credible with product managers, engineers, researchers, and data partners.
• Strong diagnostic skills to identify whether problems stem from unclear ownership, weak prioritization, poor communication, missing information, unrealistic timing, or design gaps.
• Clear and calm communication, especially during fast movement, uncomfortable tradeoffs, or changing priorities.
• Comfort working at multiple altitudes: shaping engagement models and cleaning up project trackers.
• Strong judgment on when to add structure, simplify, or step back.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience as the first design program manager or design operations hire in a scaling product organization.
• Experience supporting a design org of 25+ people across multiple product areas.
• Experience with design systems operations, product launch readiness, or cross-functional planning rituals.
• Familiarity with AI-enabled workflows for summarizing signals, maintaining operating systems, identifying risks, or improving team communication.
• Experience in B2B SaaS, platform products, multi-product suites, or products serving both SMB and partner/channel customers.