Group Product Design Manager, Systems

Adobe•San Francisco, CA

6d•Hybrid

About The Position

Do you see the design system as the engine that lets an entire design org move faster? In this role you’ll lead the team that turns craft into shared, reusable building blocks — the libraries, tokens, and components every other design team depends on, and the bridge that carries that work into code. When this team does its job well, every surface ships faster and our products feel like one Adobe. As Group Design Manager, Systems, you’ll lead both sides of the practice: the design side — component libraries, tokens, specs, guidelines, and accessibility — and the creative-technology side — Storybook, engineering handoff, plugins, and foundations. You’ll set the strategy, grow the team, and drive adoption and education so the system is understood and used across the org, not just maintained. Working closely with product management, engineering, and research, you’ll provide design direction, raise the quality bar, and connect the team’s work to the business decisions it’s meant to inform. You’ll turn a high-craft group into a force multiplier for everyone who builds on top of the system.

Requirements

8+ years in design, including experience leading and growing teams — ideally in design systems, platform design, or a closely related space.
You live at the intersection of design and code: equally comfortable in Figma and a code editor, and 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 — you know what it takes to get a product from 90% to 100%, and you hold a pixel-perfect quality bar across implementation and interactions.
You think in systems and build reusable, maintainable component libraries — with tokens, variables, and accessibility baked in — that let the whole team ship faster.
You move fast, prototyping ideas in hours rather than days to validate concepts before full build.
You’re excited about AI and want to help define new interaction paradigms.
Strategy and product sense: you connect design craft to measurable business and customer impact, reason in assertions, evidence, and trade-offs, and frame problems before jumping to solutions.
A collaborative, people-first leadership style — 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, native or cross-platform UI (e.g., Electron), and an understanding of code editors and IDEs.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the direction for the design system across design and creative technology, and tie every initiative to the business or product decision it’s meant to inform.
For every initiative, clearly articulate the audience and behavior shift you’re targeting, the user value, the assertion the work tests, the metric that will move your confidence, and the decision the work informs.
Set and protect a clear standard of quality — across whether the work is useful, usable, and modern — and help the team know what level each piece of work needs to reach, from bare minimum to exceptional.
Act as a player-coach: delegate audit, spec, and token work across the team so delivery isn’t bottlenecked on any one person, and grow designers and technologists through coaching and clear ownership.
Own the design-to-code bridge end to end, keeping tokens, components, and specs moving cleanly from design into engineering, and holding the team to its schedules and quality.
Drive adoption and education across surfaces, and make the system’s value visible to leadership through clear narratives and a regular communication cadence.
Partner with product management, engineering, and research on strategy, priorities, and staffing, and bring stakeholders along through high-stakes decisions.