About the Role
As a Design Manager, you will lead a team of product designers tackling enterprise challenges. Your primary functions will be 1) Design team development and 2) Design direction. Team development consists of hiring, coaching, mentoring, empowering and unblocking your team. Providing design direction involves giving feedback, contributing to product definition and creation, influencing and collaborating across teams and pushing teams to both think big and reduce complexity.
You will empower designers to generate multiple concepts that solve customer problems and evolve them into complete, well-documented solutions that deliver results against team and business goals. Our ideal candidate pushes relentlessly for simplification and works with their team to drive and create a well-defined vision. They move with speed and work to uphold the highest standards of quality.
Areas of Responsibility Include:
- Inspiring and mentoring team members; helping them grow in their careers; championing and highlighting their work
- Growing the team by hiring diverse and passionate people that complement the existing team
- Guiding the team in their work; balancing the work across your team; rolling up your sleeves and jumping in when needed to help out with design deliverables
- Supporting team in envisioning and delivering end-to-end experiences that help users to feel connected, productive, and successful at work
- Critiquing design work and providing actionable feedback to ensure design quality
- Collaborating cross-functionally with product management, engineering, and other design and research groups to ensure a smooth product development process.
- Seeking out ways to unblock your team and deliver
- Understanding the domain and its product strategy, helping to craft it through partnership, and communicating the ‘why’ behind your team’s work
- Fostering frequent communication about the design work with partners and design leaders
- Encouraging and seeking out opportunities for early design involvement and partnership throughout the product lifecycle
- Aligning with other design teams that focus on similar personas and related product areas
- Working with other design leaders to evolve ways of working
About You
- Build trust with, support, and empower your team
- Nurture morale and a great team culture
- Positive, can do attitude
- Collaboration is your middle name
- Effective communicator, and you are not afraid to have difficult and uncomfortable conversations to help your team
- Love learning -- whether through formal education / certifications or on your own
- Inventive when it comes to processes and also use what’s out there
- Apply a business lens while infusing design into conversations
- Cut through uncertainty and provide clarity in ambiguous situation
- 5+ years professional experience as a UX lead, with at least 2 years managing UX designers
- Portfolio of design work
Other Qualifications
- BA/BS or Master's degree in a User Centered Design related field preferred
- Experience shepherding designs throughout an agile development process
- Strong cross-functional collaboration skills - you are comfortable interacting with a variety of partners across product management, engineering, design and research
- Solid understanding of design for various platforms and device types
- Experience designing or coaching teams to design mobile first
- Strong storytelling skills to facilitate communication about the work
- Enthusiasm for and willingness to dive into and understand the changing world of work and how people thrive and grow and how it informs Workday's Learning product
