Product Design Manager, Experience Platform

Product Design at Gusto is made up of over 60 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We’re a cross-functional bunch focused on Design, Research, Writing, Ops and Front-end Development who are always looking for opportunities to build understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto. We don’t care a whole lot about swim lanes and we work closely with our partners in Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to design, build and ship experiences that make a difference. We are passionate advocates for thoughtful, crafted, and inclusive experiences and we believe great design can make hard things possible, even delightful. Read more about Design at Gusto.

About the opportunity

As the Product Designer Manager for Experience Platform, you’ll be responsible for operating in a player-coach capacity on the team responsible for designing and building our core experience platform including: common experiences like the employee lifecycle, reporting, roles and permissions, communications platform, and more. You’ll initially have three direct reports, and we’re hiring a fourth, who you’ll work collaboratively with to build cohesive, simple user experiences that scale. You’ll also have the opportunity to work closely with our Principal Designer who is stewarding a lot of the design vision across our Platform. Although your primary job is to empower your team and align with key cross functional partners in product management and engineering, you will also take on limited projects as an individual contributor to build deep domain expertise and unblock your team.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Work with cross-functional partners in Product Management, Engineering, and Data Science to understand customer problems and identify key opportunities for the customer and our business.
• Empower a small deal of product designers, creating the conditions for them to do work they’re proud of and that serves the needs of our customers. 
• Craft the end-to-end journeys and develop frameworks and principles that can be used to help align our teams on the right experiences.
• Collaborate with other key teams and stakeholders at Gusto such as Legal, Compliance, Risk Operations, Customer Support, and other various product owners. 
• Ensure that proposed solutions are customer-informed through research, data, and insights from our Customer Support team.
• Balance an iterative approach and urgency to solve customer pain with ensuring that short term improvements ladder up to long-term vision and meet a high bar for the customer experience.
• Hold high standards for the customer experience, including partnering with engineering partners to refine the end customer experience and ensure that what we release is bug free, performant, accessible, and responsive.
• Design and advocate for cohesive experiences. through the use of Workbench, our Design System, and other platform capabilities.
• Speak clearly to tradeoffs and the “Why” behind design decisions in terms non-designers can understand and participate in.
• Collaborate with designers and design leaders on other teams to develop cohesive solutions for shared problems.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 6+ years' Product Design experience, with at least 2 of those years being in management roles. Ideally you’ve worked on enabling simple, easy to use experiences in complex domains like payroll, benefits, finance or banking, etc.
• A track record of up-leveling direct reports and raising the bar for design quality within an organization.
• A proven track record of designing great UX for complex workflows and crafting end-to-end experience visions and frameworks, while showcasing an iterative approach toward execution.
• A customer-focused mindset and can speak to the impact of the experience they’ve shipped in tangible terms the business understands.
• Strong opinions loosely held and a willingness to engage in constructive debates about scope and tradeoffs to build alignment and unblock work.You’ve built great relationships with cross functional collaborators and know how to model this for your team. 
• Communication and collaboration skills that enable you to explain the impact of your work, tradeoffs you’ve made, lessons learned, and design rationale, and generate alignment and enthusiasm across the company.
• Ability to embrace ambiguous situations as opportunities to add clarity.
• A builder who loves being hands on crafting high quality, high impact solutions directly and through pairing with more junior team members:
• Systems thinking, including using and contributing to a Design System and designing with a Platform-first approach.
• Strong UX craft — you can break down complex experiences and design with consideration for all touch points. 
• Ability to explain the impact of your work, tradeoffs you’ve made, lessons learned, and design rationale. 
• Strong understanding of common web patterns, foundations, and the ability to discern when to innovate versus adopt existing standards.
• Passion for Gusto’s mission and the impact we can have on the world.

At Gusto, we strive to provide rewards that empower employees to achieve their financial and personal goals. We offer competitive compensation packages with a strong emphasis on equity based compensation (ownership in Gusto). To learn more about Gusto’s compensation philosophy and benefits offerings please view our Total Rewards Approach page.

Our cash compensation range for this role is $133,000/yr to $182,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $161,000/yr to $219,000/yr in San Francisco & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.