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.

7+ years of experience in design program management, design operations, product operations, technical program management, or a related role supporting product/design/engineering teams.
Have worked in a high-growth product environment where priorities shift quickly and process needs to serve the work, not dominate it.
Understand product design deeply enough to improve critiques, reviews, design quality rituals, and delivery workflows without needing to be the design decision-maker.
Are excellent at turning ambiguity into operating clarity: agendas, decision logs, milestone plans, dependency maps, status systems, escalation paths, and practical rituals people actually use.
Can build trust with designers while also being credible with product managers, engineers, researchers, and data partners.
Know how to diagnose whether a problem is caused by unclear ownership, weak prioritization, poor communication, missing information, unrealistic timing, or an actual design gap.
Communicate clearly and calmly, especially when teams are moving fast, tradeoffs are uncomfortable, or priorities are changing.
Are comfortable working at multiple altitudes: helping shape an engagement model one hour and cleaning up a messy project tracker the next.
Have strong judgment about when to add structure, when to simplify, and when to get out of the team's way.

Design Program Manager

Key skills