Design Program Manager, Design Systems

About this role

Design Ops at Faire owns and scales processes and programs that enable the Design team to be efficient and effective as we rapidly grow. The Design Ops team is responsible for managing programs focused on our people, business, and product—all of which help shape and drive the Design team’s craft, culture, and priorities. As a founding member of the Design Ops team, you will help define the Design Systems operational strategy—program and roadmap tracking, advocacy, and communication. You will be a key owner in scaling and shaping the future of the Design org at Faire.

We’re looking for team members who are kind, collaborative, have a bias to action, and excel at developing creative solutions that will ensure a best-in-class Design org.

This role can be remote, or has flexible options in one of our offices in San Francisco, CA, Los Angeles, CA, New York City, NY, Atlanta, GA, Toronto, ON, or Kitchener, ON.

What you’ll do 

• Partner with Design Systems leadership to establish efficient team operations and programs that support Faire’s Design System, Slate. 
• Guide quarterly planning and roadmapping with Design System’s Product Manager:
  • Ensure measurable OKRs that align with essential Design initiatives. Drive the measurement of these OKRs to help the team stay accountable.
  • Support in defining scope, collecting feedback from external stakeholders and users of the system.
  • Drive deliverables, schedules, and release planning across external product design and engineering teams.
• Create and facilitate processes to improve tracking and communication of design system progress across the program of work, ensuring cross-functional partners and design teams are aligned and on track.
• Manage and optimize the process for the team to log issues, prioritize, and resolve visual and functional bugs for different libraries of the design system.
• In partnership with the Design System leadership, create and socialize processes for how designers and engineers will adopt and contribute to the system. Drive adoption of developed processes across the organization.
• Organize roadshows and training on the design system to our design, engineering, product teams.
• Enable continuous improvement during and after projects, by driving cross team retrospectives, documenting learnings, and making meaningful changes for future efforts that ensure we can ship our system at quality.
• Prioritize competing and shifting needs with good reasoning and creative solutions.
• See around corners and proactively problem solve.
• Contribute best practices with the Design Ops team to drive team-wide excellence.

Qualifications

• 7+ years as a program or project manager, preferably with hands-on experience in Design Systems or product development.
• Strong program or project management, including team leadership, stakeholder management, organizational and executional ability.
• Understanding of the user-centered design process. Ability to understand needs, brainstorm ideas, and act quickly and be resourceful.  
• A growth mindset. You’re open and receptive to feedback, and can adapt quickly in a fast-paced environment. You’re focused on maximizing impact for your programs, and the Design org as a whole.
• Clear communicator. Effective, clear and proactive communicator with the ability to present and inspire, drive alignment, and build support.
• Lead through influence. You strike a balance between leading and guiding teams, leveraging your knowledge and expertise to influence. 
• Champion of diversity. You understand and advocate for the impact of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in Design. 
• Tools savvy. Working knowledge of common project management tools (Asana, Notion, G Suite, etc.) and know when to use one tool over the other. Experience working with design and creative tooling a plus.