Product Design Manager

An overview of this role

GitLab is looking for a Product Design Manager to join the Plan stage. As a design leader, you own the delivery of UX commitments, are always looking to improve productivity, and are responsible for the user experience in the product. While you are credible as a designer and know the details of what product designers work on, your time is spent hiring a world-class team and putting them in the best position to succeed.

This is an incredibly exciting time to join the Plan stage - your product scope spans our Product Planning, Project Management, and Knowledge groups. You will be facilitating improvements to our planning solutions in order to provide our enterprise customers visibility into the success of their plans, help bridge the gap between different teams, and empower teams to confidently make planning decisions. Our Work Items initiative will be a key area of focus, which provides collaboration capabilities that empower small, autonomous teams to continuously deliver customer and business value with the shortest possible cycle times.

You'll be working closely with the Product Management and Engineering teams to execute on the product roadmap and priorities.

Some examples of our projects: 

• Work items enhancements
• Improved Epic Experience on Work Items Framework
• Summarize issue discussions using AI
• Improved Data Filtering and Visualization

What you’ll do  

• Proactively identify large, strategic UX opportunities that span both inside your areas and across the product. Work with other product design managers, staff, and principal product designers to drive cross-product initiatives through awareness and prioritization.
• Identify strategic user research initiatives that span multiple stage groups (and possibly the entire product), and work with other product design/research managers to organize research efforts.
• Be a frequent and active participant in milestones by reviewing UX deliverables (such as research and designs) that your team creates, and provide feedback to ensure high-quality output.
• Communicate the value of UX to cross-functional GitLab team members and work with them to leverage the product development flow. 
• Help the product teams of areas you support to prioritize UX initiatives including Deferred UX, triage and resolution of UX bugs, and overall usability improvements to the product. Lead UX Scorecard initiatives in order to consistently measure the experience of your product areas and show improvements over time.
• Contribute to product direction conversations, with emphasis on leading the experience vision for your product areas.
• Hire, grow and retain a world-class team of Designers.

What you’ll bring 

• Experience managing a group of designers remotely, who work on complex products.
• Deep experience designing enterprise agile planning tools.
• Experience defining/executing on the high-level strategy (the why) and creating design deliverables (the how) based on research.
• Experience driving organizational change with cross-functional stakeholders, including Product Management and Engineering.
• Solid visual awareness with understanding of basic design principles and accessibility.
• You share our values, and work in accordance with those values.
• You possess leadership qualities needed to thrive at Gitlab.
• Ability to use GitLab.

About the team

You will work closely with two designers, with the opportunity to hire a third this year. You will collaborate with the Group Product Manager and Senior Engineering Manager to improve team communication and maintain excitement about the opportunities ahead. You can learn more about what our teams are working on by visiting a few of our direction pages:

• Portfolio Management
• Team Planning
• Wiki
• Pages

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.