Product Design Manager, Create

Our handbook is public. You can find the details of our vision & direction, check out how we structure our R&D teams, and understand how our UX team operates.

As a Product Design Manager at GitLab, you will be responsible for managing a team of 6 Product Designers. These Product Designers are embedded in groups working on some of our most visible, high-traffic, impactful areas such as code review, source code management, and remote development.

What you can expect in a Product Design Manager role at GitLab:

• You’ll advocate for good product design practices, ensure the visibility of product design across functions, create space for collaboration, and develop a deep level of subject matter expertise in the product areas your reports are operating in.
• You’ll work with your direct reports to build out a UX strategy for code review, remote development, and source code management that aligns with our mission, vision, strategy.
• You’ll approach management in a way that is informed by our view on what is required of a Manager at GitLab. We default to asynchronous communication, so your management style will need to work in the context of our all-remote, global team.
• You’ll collaborate with our R&D Leadership team to manage OKRs for our product design practice. These OKRs will shape your team’s process, define your responsibilities as a manager, and feed into the responsibilities of your direct reports while enabling our company to meet its goals.
• You’ll play a key part in the evolution of our design culture and drive initiatives that enable Product Designers to achieve greater results.
• You’ll champion the importance of participation in critiques, content creation, and speaking engagements.
• You’ll foster a safe space for your team, where they’re comfortable sharing feedback and advocating for change they see as necessary.
• You’ll play a big part in hiring a team of world-class Product Designers. You’ll need to be highly engaged in the recruiting process as we scale our global team.
• You’ll work with cross-functional partners to identify and remedy pain points in our product development process, ensuring effective collaboration with our Product, Development, and Quality counterparts.

You should apply if:

• You’ve got, at minimum, a few years of experience managing Product or UX design teams of 3+ direct reports. Alternatively, you're able to demonstrate leadership skills and experiences impacting design quality across multiple teams.
• You’ve got hands-on experience with developer tools - either as a user or a designer/design leader. You understand how developers work in different environments (UI, IDE, CLI, etc...) and your experience will enable you to develop strong opinions on what users need.
• Your knowledge, vision, and experience will enable you to play a key role in shaping the next evolution of developer tooling.
• You enjoy advocating for user research and usability testing, and you continually look to improve your team’s user research and usability testing abilities.
• You want to manage a team that is designing a complex product with cross-functional users and continually evolving needs.
• You understand frontend code, Git, and the limitations of frontend technology. You are comfortable with Git-based workflows and bring experience with the command-line.
• You’re comfortable with design reviews and occasionally being hands-on with design tools such as Figma.
• Mentoring, leading, and growing your team is truly motivating to you.
• Our values of collaboration, results, efficiency, diversity, iteration, and transparency resonate with you.
• You'll thrive in an environment where self-learning and self-service are encouraged and instilled as a part of our culture.

What it's like to work at GitLab:

The culture at GitLab is something we're incredibly proud of. You'll spend your time collaborating with kind, talented, and motivated colleagues from across the globe.

Some of the benefits you'll be entitled to vary by the region or country you're in. However, all GitLab team members are fully remote and are encouraged to put family and friends first with our paid time off policy that doesn't count the number of days you take off annually.

You can work incredibly flexible hours, enabled by our asynchronous approach to communication. We'll also help you set up your home office environment, pay for your membership to a co-working space, and, every year or so, we'll invite you to our Contribute event.

Our hiring process and compensation:

The hiring process for this Product Designer position typically follows five stages. The details of this process can be found at the bottom of our job family page. Our compensation calculator will be shared with candidates selected for a team interview.