Product Design Manager

Summary

Join Grafana Labs as a Product Design Manager and lead a team of 4-5 designers in a fully remote environment. You will be a key leader within the R&D organization, defining and driving product design strategy. Responsibilities include team leadership, design leadership, and team building, focusing on coaching, mentoring, and performance evaluation. This role requires several years of product design management experience and a strong generalist product design skillset. The position offers a competitive salary and benefits package, including equity and bonuses.

Requirements

• Have a few years of Product Design people management experience
• Possess strong, proactive remote communication, collaboration, facilitation, and relationship building skills

Responsibilities

• Operate as a leader within the R&D organization at Grafana representing the Product Design function
• Own, define, communicate, and drive execution on product design strategy in support of overall product and business strategy for your team’s part of the Grafana product surface
• Work closely with your cross-functional peers across Engineering, Product Management, Documentation and Tech Writing, and other R&D functions
• Build strong working relationships with these peers, leaders, and stakeholders to help leverage our Product Design capabilities to achieve product and business goals
• Own the Product Design staffing strategy for your remit and be the reporting manager for a small team of 4-5 product designers
• Work to ensure that the designers on your team are effectively supporting the EPD+ squads they are embedded with
• Continually work with EPD+ collaborators and leaders to unblock your team members’ progress and collect, synthesize, and share feedback on your team members’ performance
• Work closely with the rest of the Product Design leadership team to identify staffing gaps in Product Design support coverage across the Grafana product surface
• Explore opportunities to fill these through internal people movement and/or external hiring, working with our Recruiting team to execute on hiring processes in an effective and equitable way
• Occasionally leverage your own IC Product Design skillset to contribute hands on either to design strategy artifact creation or, when a short-term staffing gap exists on a high-priority project, to design execution within an EPD+ cross-functional squad
• Work with the IC designers on your team to help them define the product design direction for their projects and execute on it with their EPD+ partners
• Coach and mentor your reports in various aspects of the product design skillset
• Provide actionable and specific feedback to your reports and set stretch goals for them to continually improve performance
• Be available, approachable, and skilled at building strong working relationships with your reports
• Help your reports define short and longer term career goals, map out their career progression, and progress in areas of strength, developmental areas, and areas of interest
• Evaluate and communicate the performance of your reports on an ongoing basis and capture these evaluations formally in performance reviews
• Evaluate your reports’ readiness for promotions and advocate for this when appropriate
• Understand the challenges and opportunities of managing a highly diverse and distributed design team
• Build a positive team culture that fosters psychological safety, encourages innovation and experimentation, embraces failure, celebrates successes, and enables your team to achieve greater impact than the sum of its parts

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrate a well-rounded generalist product design skillset with a track record of shipping effective user experiences for complex B2B/enterprise software products
• Demonstrate ability to coach, mentor, provide both positive and constructive feedback to, and inspire a diverse team of product designers in a remote-first setting
• Demonstrate ability to build and leverage strong relationships with cross-functional partners and leaders across Engineering, Product Management, Documentation, and other functions
• Demonstrate ability to lead teams in developing artifacts, processes, and ways of working that improve cross-functional product development practices
• Demonstrate excellent communication, collaboration, and interpersonal skills
• Demonstrate a balanced leadership style characterized by a combination of kindness, pragmatism, and a focus on driving business impact
• Demonstrate ability to model and exemplify Grafana cultural values
• Demonstrate experience leading product design for tools and services aimed at developers or other highly technical users
• Demonstrate ability to rapidly gain an understanding of a technical domain and associated customer needs and user workflows in order to design effective experiences within that domain
• Demonstrate domain knowledge or experience related to observability
• Demonstrate experience helping design teams level up their impact on users, products, and organizations through continuous improvement of cross-functional and internal collaboration and practices

Benefits

• Equity
• Bonus (if applicable)