Product Design Manager

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.

About Cleo

Most people come to Cleo to do work that matters. Every day, we empower people to build a life beyond their next paycheck, building a beloved AI that enables you to forge your own path toward financial well-being.

Backed by some of the most well-known investors in tech, we’ve reached over 7 million users and plan to double that number each year... which is where you come in.

Follow us on LinkedIn to keep up to date with new product features and insights from the team.

The Role

As a chat-first, AI-powered product, we're moving through uncharted territory. Everyday there are new challenges around user experience, brand, tone of voice, AI ethics, and applied machine learning that you can't just look up the answer to. It’s very exciting time to join and we’re looking for strong design leaders to help make it happen!

• Accountable to the Head of Design as part of the Experience Design Leadership team (User researchers, Content Designers, marketers and Product Designers)
• Responsible for the product design direction and strategy of one of three company pillars.
• Responsible for leading and managing Product Design Leads and Seniors placed in the cross-functional squads within your pillar. You will forge a strong pillar leader relationship with your peers in experience, product, data and tech.
• Responsible for ensuring appropriate resourcing in your pillar, taking into account individual strengths, experience and development needs.
• Siting outside of a squad, you lead the holistic cross pillar view of the product. Whilst not making designs for delivery you will be involved in vision prototypes and strategy decks, so as such this is a hybrid IC and manager role. You will be accountable for the quality of the product design execution, ways of working, and also managing and growing the product designers within your pillar.
• Responsible for ensuring we meet commercial targets and business performance within a your pillar area through support for strategy, hiring and resourcing. Ensures direct reports and design team receive Cleo operational messages effectively.
• This is a new role at Cleo and you will likely help to define and shape it.

An example of some of your responsibilities in this role:

• You will translate the company-wide vision and strategy to your pillar’s impact. As Cleo leans more heavily into chat-based financial coaching, you will create a design vision that shows how we can coach our users to improve their financial health, and how this relates to our other product offerings.
• You will engage with the Senior leadership team to align your Pillar OKRs to the company OKRs reflecting both customer and business needs
• You will engage key members of user experience, product, marketing and engineering in the creation of this design vision, getting feedback and aligning with the company and product strategy and then use this to improve the design of our product overall
• Work with your cross functional pillar leaders to determine the key improvements that need to be made in our existing product flows in order to realise the design vision, and align with squads on getting this baseline in place within your pillar
• Collaborate with Brand and Marketing to make sure all designs are consistent across pillars and every user touchpoint so that our design work is always world-class quality
• Establish and maintain design processes and best practices that enable efficient and scalable design operations across the three pillars with your counterpart pillar leaders.
• Drive a user-centric design approach, advocating for user needs and ensuring that product designs are accessible, inclusive, and engaging for a diverse audience

You should apply if you:

• You have experience leading and managing product design teams of 5+, ensuring quality but also actively nurturing your direct reports and their careers
• You are a systems thinker and have significant experience and expertise in leading product design strategy and management of designers horizontally across a company
• You can handle a high level of ambiguity, can demonstrate initiative, persistence and cooperation to uncover unknown solutions, as well as extensive and complex analysis to understand and resolve the most important problems
• Have experience setting a design vision for the pillar that aligns with the company and product strategy, and visualising how a product’s competitive advantage and uniqueness can be achieved
• Have great leadership and communication skills - You are a master storyteller with demonstrated ability to influence stakeholders and executives, you can get the whole company excited about your design vision and articulate how it links to the company and product strategy. You can represent design at the leadership level and contribute meaningfully to strategic decisions.
• Are happy working in a startup environment at pace. You have a “done vs. perfect” mindset to get pragmatic improvements out the door and then improve them iteratively rather than taking a long time over something 100% perfect.
• Are a great people leader: On the team and across Cleo, you’ll foster a culture of collaboration, inclusivity and innovation. Participates in all stages of IC and Manager hiring process and helps promote Design at the company externally
• You can advocate for the value of design impact to the business because you deeply care about understanding other humans and their relationships with money. You’re passionate about our goal of radically improving our users' relationship with money.
• Are commercially-minded: You understand our product’s competitive landscape and know how user value affects business value, taking this into account in your design decisions and prioritisation.

What do you get for all your hard work?

• A competitive compensation package (base + equity) with regular reviews. You can view our public progression framework and salary bandings here: https://cleo-ai.progressionapp.com/teams/design-99onksha5wa5 - this role is PD5 
• Work at one of the fastest-growing tech startups, backed by top VC firms, Balderton & EQT Ventures
• A clear progression plan. We want you to keep growing. That means trying new things, leading others, challenging the status quo and owning your impact. Always with our complete support.
• Flexibility: We treat you as humans first, employees second. Because we can’t fight for the world’s financial health, if we’re not healthy ourselves. This means all the usual perks but it also means flexibility. We take pride in being a flexible workplace that trusts our Cleople to deliver their best work, giving you the autonomy to structure your day around morning drop-offs to school or daily dog walks.  
• Work where you work best. We’re a globally distributed team. If you live in London we have a hybrid approach, we’d love you to spend one day a week or more in our beautiful office. If you’re outside of London, we’ll encourage you to spend a couple of days with us a few times per year. And we’ll cover your travel costs, naturally.
• Other benefits: Check out our new benefits package here, and see below for the highlights: 
  • 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays (+ an additional day for every year you spend at Cleo)
  • 6% employer-matched pension 
  • Performance reviews every 8 months
  • Private Medical Insurance via Vitality, dental cover, and life assurance
  • Enhanced parental leave
  • 1 month paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo
  • Regular socials and activities, online and in-person
  • We'll pay for your OpenAI subscription
  • Online mental health support via Spill
  • And many more!