Senior Manager, Product Design

Who’ll You Be Joining:  

The Product Design team is comprised of a group of system thinkers who have deep empathy for our customers. We ensure that each touchpoint of the customer journey is carefully crafted to provide a useful, usable, and delightful experience. This includes ensuring cohesion across marketing, industrial design and interfaces, voice prompts, mobile apps, and website experiences. We care about the people we work with. This means we trust each other, are generous with feedback, and prioritize data and research over individual opinions.

As a product design manager, you are a team leader, design advocate, and mentor with a deep understanding of the industry and a strong design sensibility. You will be responsible for managing a group of talented product designers and leading the design process and strategy.

Lead and manage a diverse, multi-disciplinary product design team that collaborates with product managers, engineers, researchers, content designers, marketing, and more. Work closely with leaders from various disciplines to guide your team in creating exceptional end-to-end user experiences across all touchpoints. Act as a bridge between design and business aspects, consistently advocating for the customers and their experiences in cross-functional settings.

As a people manager, your role includes helping team members learn and grow. You will provide individualized support to help them reach their full potential and navigate their unique career paths. Foster the professional development of your team members, focusing on both design skills and soft skills, while encouraging leadership qualities.

As a design leader, you will take ownership of the design strategy for smart security products, with a specific focus on driving growth in the home monitoring business. Utilize data-driven insights to experiment with innovative ideas and support the team in refining designs to achieve desired business outcomes. Collaborate with product teams to create and optimize a sustainable user experience that attracts and retains long-term engaged users.

How You’ll Make an Impact:

• Lead and manage a passionate group of Product Designers
• Iterate on skills matrices and develop learning plans to facilitate growth in each team member’s career path
• Create an environment that fosters creativity, builds trust, and keeps the team highly engaged and proud of the work they’re doing
• Actively participate in recruiting efforts, including defining interview structures, advising on gaps in overall team structure and capabilities, creating case studies, headcount forecasting, and onboarding processes
• Advocate for users in a fast-paced environment, elevating the design practice and ultimately pushing ecobee to reach a new level of UX maturity
• Lead design critiques, team retrospectives, team learning initiatives, management reviews, quarterly planning, and engagement survey discussions.

What You’ll  Bring to the Table:

• You have a bachelor’s degree in Design or equivalent degree or work experience
• You have 5-8+ years of experience working as a product designer or a similar role
• You have more than 2 years’ experience leading and growing successful design teams
• You have mentored less experienced team members through constructive criticism and empathy
• You have proven experience fostering strong relationships with cross-functional agile teams. You can effectively guide designers to communicate and negotiate with other cross-functional members
• You advocate using data and evidence in iterative decision making. You can support designers to partner with research to design and run experiments; take findings, iterate, and improve on designs through evaluative and generative research
• You have excellent communication, presentation, interpersonal, and negotiation skills for a broad range of audiences including leadership

Just so you know: The hired candidate will be required to complete a background check

Career growth and development:

• Active career coaching through regular 1:1s with your manager and leadership
• A learning budget is provided and actively encouraged to develop new skills or sharpen existing ones.
• Career growth tracks are offered to ensure that practitioners are placed in positions to grow based on their skills, interests, and career aspirations
• Frequent learning and development sessions offered by the company as well as by the department to support career growth

What happens after you apply: 

Application review. It will happen. By an actual person in Talent Acquisition. We get upwards of 100+ applications for some roles, it can take a few days, but every applicant can expect a note regarding their application status. 

Interview Process:

• A 30-minute phone/video call with a member in Talent Acquisition
• A 30-minute video call with a hiring manager— this will be a casual chat to learn more about your past and future career aspirations
• A 1-hour video call with members of the team focusing on the UX strategy and problem solving – you will be asked to share one project (or more if you’re inclined to) from your portfolio that you believe best demonstrates your ability for the role
• A 90-minute whiteboarding exercise with cross functional representatives
• A 30-minute final round interview with an Executive Leader