Design Manager

Mercury is a fully online banking experience built on the belief that thoughtful design can actually make life easier for busy founders. We aim to bring simplicity and humanity to an industry that’s known for being anything but. Our designers craft products that create impact in their efficiency, and add practical magic to the mundane.

We’ve got a great team of senior designers already in place, we’ve built a foundation that customers enjoy using, and we believe we can push ourselves even further by adding an experienced manager. We’re looking for a person who is excited to have a significant impact on Mercury’s product experience and the way Mercury design team operates. The Design Manager will actively shape and reshape team processes, help designers see the bigger picture of the product and business through crits and mentorship, coach the team on product thinking and cross-team communication, and lead by example.

In this role, you’ll:

• Understand our product, business, brand, and processes inside and out. Once you know how it all works, you’ll help us come up with ways to improve.
• Know your team and help them grow. Use 1:1s to provide coaching and mentorship, come up with structures to help prioritize work, and and make sure nobody feels burnt out.
• Make your team feel like a Team. Plan team trips, organize working sessions, share inspo, and encourage collaborative projects that make our remote, distributed group feel less remote and distributed.
• Document and evangelize what works (design systems, team meetings, internal processes), and ditch what doesn’t.
• Create an environment where people feel comfortable pushing back on work that doesn’t hit the mark, and model radical candor with feedback that’s provocative rather than prescriptive.
• Help us hire more great people.

There are a lot of paths that could lead you to a role like this, so we encourage you to apply even if you’re not sure. Some relevant skills that can help:

• You’ve led a creative team of any size. Extra points if you’ve helped grow a team from medium to large.
• You’re good at wrangling ambiguity and finding ways to improve the world around you, even when nobody’s told you to do so.
• You can tell when you’ve hit on the right amount of process/structure without it feeling stifling or unnecessary.
• You keep up on design trends and like to stay in practice, even if it’s been awhile since you were an IC.
• You can tell when something’s good and articulate clearly (and kindly) when it’s not.
• You’re adept at asking questions that aren’t just answers or opinions in disguise.

About the team:

Our group is currently 15 product, brand, and content designers embedded within product teams. They work closely with business and engineering leads to research, pitch, and spec new features that they design and help launch.

While the product team is the designer’s day-to-day source of new work, the design team is where they go for everything else: feedback and crit on work-in-progress, inspiration from other designers, alignment on design systems and product decisions outside their teams, and overall creative community.