Product Design Manager, Design Systems

What’s the role?

The Design Systems team is responsible for creating the visual-and-interactive system that product teams rely upon to build beautiful, usable digital user experiences in a scalable and repeatable way. Our design system consists of the components and patterns, guidelines, and toolkits that enable designers and engineers to quickly-and-efficiently build products for the millions of Etsy buyers and sellers from across the world.

This role will work alongside product and engineering leaders to lead the strategy and operations of this multidisciplinary initiative, while coaching and providing direction for designers as they evolve the design system.

What’s product design management like at Etsy?

Typically, product design managers at Etsy partner with product management and engineering to lead teams passionate about customer outcomes, while mentoring and growing the product designers on that team. 

Day to day, it looks like: 

• Lead product designers by mentoring and creating career growth opportunities for those on your team

• Collaborate with cross-functional team leads to craft the vision, strategy, and operations of your initiatives

• Ensure we are building the right products for our customers, and help teams take the best near-term steps toward their long-term vision

• Advocate for our customer, and guide teams to deliver well-executed and on-brand experiences

• Lead regular design reviews, critiques, and brainstorming sessions for your teams 

• Facilitate continuous learning and improvement for the product design team and its members

• Recruit and hire outstanding design talent and facilitate onboarding of new designers

• Work alongside the broader Design Leadership team to craft our teams’ culture, processes, and tools

Product Design Manager at Etsy means you have a track record of:

• Leading design strategy for sophisticated initiatives and growing design leaders 

• Leading through ambiguity, making use of your soft skills to persuade and build alignment with senior leaders around a vision and approach

• Using comprehensive thinking to identify customer experience opportunities that create impact across the organization

• Partnering with a design leadership team to provide feedback and improve our management practices

• Incorporating advancements in the field of product design to guide the skills and practices of our team

• Developing a deep understanding of current design patterns and UX trends, and can guide your design team to use these in practice

Qualities we value in design leaders:

• Effective articulation of ideas and design solutions

• Expressing feedback with kindness and candor

• Tolerance for ambiguity and healthy curiosity

• Translation of quantitative & qualitative insights into design decisions

• Contribution to our culture: motivation, optimism, quality, integrity