Ux Designer Manager

ADP•Roseland, NJ

11d

About The Position

ADP is building a next-generation AI-native HCM platform for small businesses. We are rethinking what payroll, HR, and compliance software looks like when it is designed from the ground up with Generative AI technology at the center. We are looking for a Director of UX Design who can do three things at once: 1) lead and develop a small team of designers, 2) establish design governance and related processes that do not exist yet, and 3) work hands-on as an individual contributor designer across product domains. This is a player-coach role. You will build scaffolding (process, rituals) and hold the quality bar, while still practicing your craft as a designer. You will move between big-picture conversations with senior stakeholders, engineering & product partners, and pixel-level critique among your own team. This is a small team inside a large company, working through startup-level ambiguity while solving enterprise-scale problems.

Requirements

10+ years of hands-on UX design experience.
Led and developed other designers.
Know how to give feedback that makes people better while protecting product quality.
Still an active practitioner; portfolio includes recent IC work.
Built or significantly influenced a design governance or review process, and gotten technology partners to adopt and use it.
Strong systems thinking; can articulate how component decisions ripple throughout the broader product.
Credible in technical conversations; can hold your own with product managers, engineers, and platform architects when design and technical constraints are under discussion.
Successfully, productively integrated GenAI / LLM tooling into professional workflows and are on top of the latest developments with this technology.
Designed for AI-powered or agentic products; understand the specific UX challenges of interfaces where the system acts on the user's behalf and the user needs to trust and verify what happened.
Thrive in lean, ambiguous environments; comfortable building process from scratch, without a large team, design ops, or a pre-existing playbook.

Nice To Haves

Experience in regulated domains, especially payroll, tax, HR, fintech, healthcare, where user trust and auditability are table stakes.
Experience and delivered experiences for chat-based products.
Experience with GenAI-powered chat-based products.

Responsibilities

Build a review and gating process for proposals to add new components or capabilities to the platform, above the design system execution layer.
Collaborate daily with product, engineering, and UX research, contributing hands-on across product and design domains: interaction design, flows, prototypes, visuals, and go-to-market.
Manage and develop a small team of designers.
Run the critique cadence, enhance collaboration and communication among the team, elevate design quality across the team, and build a culture where rigorous feedback is normal.
Create the conditions for your designers to do their best work: clear context, honest assessment, space to grow.
Represent the design perspective in product planning, engineering discussions, and leadership reviews.
Translate design rationale into communications that resonate with diverse audiences, e.g. technical, non-technical, business stakeholders, and various levels of leadership.
Push back with product and design evidence and market data when the quality bar is slipping or proposals do not make sense.