Group Product Design Manager, Systems

Adobe•San Jose, CA

7d•$155,100 - $293,800•Hybrid

About The Position

In this role, you will lead the team responsible for creating shared, reusable building blocks for the design organization, including libraries, tokens, and components that are essential for other design teams and are translated into code. Your team's success will lead to faster shipping of surfaces and a more cohesive product experience across Adobe. You will manage both the design aspects (component libraries, tokens, specs, guidelines, accessibility) and the creative-technology aspects (Storybook, engineering handoff, plugins, foundations). Your responsibilities will include setting strategy, growing the team, and driving adoption and education to ensure the system is widely understood and utilized, not just maintained. You will collaborate closely with product management, engineering, and research to provide design direction, elevate the quality bar, and align the team's work with business objectives. The goal is to transform a high-craft group into a force multiplier for all who build upon the system.

Requirements

8+ years in design, including experience leading and growing teams, ideally in design systems, platform design, or a closely related space.
Comfortable at the intersection of design and code: equally comfortable in Figma and a code editor, able to translate designs into production-quality UI, or reverse-engineer code to inform design.
Strong front-end skills (TypeScript, React, CSS, animation) and the judgment to know what's feasible, scalable, and performant.
A deep eye for craft and detail, understanding what's needed to take a product from 90% to 100%, and maintaining a pixel-perfect quality bar across implementation and interactions.
Ability to think in systems and build reusable, maintainable component libraries with tokens, variables, and accessibility integrated.
Ability to move fast and prototype ideas quickly to validate concepts before full build.
Excitement about AI and a desire to help define new interaction paradigms.
Strong strategy and product sense: connecting design craft to measurable business and customer impact, reasoning in assertions, evidence, and trade-offs, and framing problems before jumping to solutions.
A collaborative, people-first leadership style, including coaching designers and engineers, influencing senior partners with clear narratives, and creating shared ownership of outcomes.

Nice To Haves

Experience with developer tools or technical products.
Experience with native or cross-platform UI (e.g., Electron).
Understanding of code editors and IDEs.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the direction for the design system across design and creative technology, tying every initiative to the business or product decision it's meant to inform.
For every initiative, clearly articulate the audience and behavior shift being targeted, the user value, the assertion the work tests, the metric that will move confidence, and the decision the work informs.
Set and protect a clear standard of quality across usefulness, usability, and modernity, and guide the team on the required level of quality for each piece of work.
Act as a player-coach, delegating audit, spec, and token work to avoid bottlenecks and grow designers and technologists through coaching and clear ownership.
Own the design-to-code bridge end-to-end, ensuring smooth transitions of tokens, components, and specs from design to engineering, and holding the team accountable for schedules and quality.
Drive adoption and education across surfaces, and make the system's value visible to leadership through clear narratives and regular communication.
Partner with product management, engineering, and research on strategy, priorities, and staffing, and influence stakeholders through high-stakes decisions.