Senior Director, Design Operations

Job description

Job Details

The DesignOps team at Slack is responsible for a mix of managing the design team’s business operations, ensuring design excellence, and helping shape and drive the design team’s culture, craft, and priorities.

This role will partner closely with the SVP of Product design as well as work cross-functional members of our product teams such as design managers, product managers, designers, engineers, and business leaders. This person will manage a team of design program managers that work on product design teams and on centralized design initiatives. They will also manage the process and prioritization to align the delivery of high-quality design work to the most important product areas, as well as support a healthy team culture across people, programs, and tools.

Job Duties

What you’ll be doing:

• Recruit, retain, and manage design program managers.
• Set expectations and maintain high standards of quality of the work for the team; inspire excellence and encourage craftsmanship.
• Help teammates identify connections and potential collisions between different products, features and platforms and reconcile these.
• Bring a design voice to the conversation and build trust between the design team and other functions.
• Establish trust and build confidence with cross-functional partners.
• Manage the design team recruiting process.
• Enable the design teams to scale and create great product and internal programs.
• Prioritize work to maximize impact on the business and the user experience.
• Identify and implement improvements for central programs such as, design onboarding, our external brand/presence, and L&D programs.
• Identify and implement improvements for product design programs such as design audits and effective user research practices.

Job Requirements

What you should have:

• 10+ years of experience in design/design operations.
• 4+ years as a people manager.
• Experience directing and guiding teams through the entire product lifestyle.
• Strong understanding of design and the different crafts that are part of the design family,
• Strong understanding of the functions adjacent to design that support the product development lifecycle eg: research, product management, engineering, data science.
• Experience building out Design Operations teams.
• Ability to influence across the organization.
• Strong understanding of different facets and types of programs that make up Design Operations.