Senior Director, Product Design

About This Role

Strava is the app for active people. With over 150 million athletes in more than 185 countries, Strava is where connection, motivation, and personal bests thrive. No matter your activity, gear, or goals, we help you find your crew, crush your milestones, and keep moving forward. Start your journey with Strava today.

Our mission is simple: to motivate people to live their best active lives. We believe in the power of movement to connect and drive people forward.

We're looking for a Senior Director, Product Design to lead our design strategy and vision across the organization. You'll be responsible for leading a 20+ product design team, championing user-centered design practices, and ensuring design excellence is integrated into every stage of product development. You'll oversee end-to-end product design initiatives, working across multiple product areas and user experiences. You'll partner closely with product managers, engineers, and researchers to define design strategy, drive feature development, and establish design standards that elevate product quality across the company. You'll translate business goals and user needs into compelling product experiences, collaborating on roadmap prioritization, and mentoring designers to foster a culture of innovation and design thinking throughout the organization.

We are looking for a leader who has experience (or knowledge of) building within subscription based business models, ability to partner closely with Research on user needs and jobs, ability to partner with our business strategy partners and experience in some of these verticals: social, mapping, cartography, data visualization, Apple Watch or other device design, and third party integrations.

We follow a flexible hybrid model that translates to more than half of your time on-site in our San Francisco office — three days per week.

What You’ll Do:

• Translate Strava's user needs and business goals into a design strategy that guides product decisions, roadmap prioritization, and feature development.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing design team through hiring, performance management, and career development.
• Influence product and engineering leaders through clear communication, data-driven advocacy, and relationship building—earning trust to shape product direction.
• Make informed design decisions that balance quality with velocity, establishing processes and systems that enable execution at scale.
• Partner across research, product, engineering, and brand/marketing to align on design requirements and ensure excellence throughout development.
• Approve product designs from information architecture to design system components to visual design, motion, rive, visual design, map and cartography, apple watch designs, data visualization, partner and third party integration and design implementation

What You’ll Bring to the Team:

• 10+ years of product design experience with proven ability to develop strategies aligned with business goals and influence strategic decisions.
• Proven ability to lead high performing design teams, with demonstrated success recruiting, managing, and retaining strong talent.
• Exceptional ability to build relationships and drive alignment across product design, product management, engineering and other cross-functional partners.
• Proven track record balancing design quality with shipping velocity in fast-paced environments while establishing efficient systems and standards.

Compensation Overview:

At Strava, we know our employees are the most important ingredient to our success, and our compensation and total rewards programs reflect that. We take a market-based approach to pay, and pay may vary depending on the department and your location. Salary ranges are categorized into one of three zones based on a cost of labor index for that geographic area. We will determine the candidate’s starting pay based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. We may modify these ranges in the future. For more information, please contact your talent partner.

Compensation: $335,000 - $355,000. This range reflects base compensation only and does not include equity or benefits. Your recruiter can share more details about the full compensation package during the hiring process.

For more information on benefits, please click here.

Why Join Us?

Movement brings us together. At Strava, we’re building the world’s largest community of active people, helping them stay motivated and achieve their goals.

Our global team is passionate about making movement fun, meaningful, and accessible to everyone. Whether you’re shaping the technology, growing our community, or driving innovation, your work at Strava makes an impact.

When you join Strava, you’re not just joining a company—you’re joining a movement. If you’re ready to bring your energy, ideas, and drive, let’s build something incredible together.

Strava builds software that makes the best part of our athletes’ days even better. Just as we’re deeply committed to unlocking their potential, we’re dedicated to providing a world-class, inclusive workplace where our employees can grow and thrive, too. We’re backed by Sequoia Capital, TCV, Madrone Partners and Jackson Square Ventures, and we’re expanding in order to exceed the needs of our growing community of global athletes. Our culture reflects our community. We are continuously striving to hire and engage teammates from all backgrounds, experiences and perspectives because we know we are a stronger team together.

Strava is an equal opportunity employer. In keeping with the values of Strava, we make all employment decisions including hiring, evaluation, termination, promotional and training opportunities, without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, physical handicap, mental disability, medical condition, disability, gender or identity or expression, pregnancy or pregnancy-related condition, marital status, height and/or weight.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

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