Manager, Product Design, Studio

Etsy•Brooklyn, NY

23h•Hybrid

About The Position

Design craft and systems thinking are how Etsy expresses quality, coherence, and personality across every product surface. As a Design Manager on Etsy's Studio team, you will lead a small team of visual and systems designers doing high-impact, cross-cutting work that shapes how experiences come together across the entire product. You set the craft bar, build a strong team, and remove the friction that keeps great design from happening. In this role, you'll grow and manage a team of Visual and Systems Designers who build frameworks, patterns, and tools that define how design functions at a platform level — from interaction systems and agentic experience patterns to design sprints that set strategic direction across buyer and seller surfaces. You will partner closely with Brand, Product Design leadership, Design Systems, and Engineering to ensure your team's output is expressive, scalable, and unmistakably Etsy. You bring a systems mentality and strong visual craft sensibility to your management practice — you know what great looks like and you coach your team toward it. Your team's work impacts every part of our ecosystem, including web, Android, and iOS. The Studio team sits within UX Platform, partnering across product and brand to elevate craft and create shared systems that accelerate high-quality experiences. We collaborate with Design Systems to build scalable frameworks and with Brand to bring our expressive language into product. We are a collaborative, curious, and craft-driven group that values rigor and partnership. If you enjoy building teams that work directly with the people who need them and setting a higher standard for design across an entire ecosystem, you will thrive here. The Studio team is collaborative, craft-driven, and curious. We form tight, time-bound partnerships with product squads rather than owning surfaces permanently—which means our work has to be rigorous enough to stick after we leave. We deliver visual systems that are optimized for reusability: frameworks, pattern libraries, and playbooks that teams can build on. We connect dots across the org to prevent fragmented, one-off solutions from calcifying into legacy. If you thrive on variety, love shaping ambiguous problems into clear systems, and want your team's work to influence every buyer and seller on the platform, you'll feel at home here.

Requirements

A portfolio or body of work demonstrating depth in visual systems, interaction design, or design systems – you have a clear point of view on what craft excellence looks like.
Experience managing Product Designers, including giving substantive craft feedback, supporting career growth, and navigating performance conversations.
Fluency with agentic prototyping tools (Cursor, Claude, or equivalent) and a genuine interest in building a team culture that defaults to prototyping in motion rather than statics.
Experience shipping design work across multiple platforms (web, iOS, Android), with an understanding of how constraints differ and where coherence matters.
The ability to operate in ambiguity: you can frame a poorly-defined problem, align collaborators on a direction, and help your team implement without a clear brief.
Strong communication and collaborator management; you can represent your team's work to design and product leadership, and create space for your designers to do the same.
A track record of deep collaboration with product, engineering, brand, and research — and of building those relationships for your team, not just yourself.

Responsibilities

Manage and grow a team of design specialists.
Lead regular 1:1s, give clear and actionable feedback on craft and process, and support each designer's growth through coaching, sponsorship, and stretch assignments.
Help your team do the best work of their careers.
Set and hold the craft bar. Know what excellent systems-level design looks like – and make sure your team gets there.
Review work with a sharp eye for interaction quality, visual precision, and pattern scalability.
Model the standards you expect.
Drive cross-cutting Studio engagements.
Partner with your team to own end-to-end Studio work: from problem framing and discovery through frameworks, guidelines, and production-ready specs.
Engage models range from short embedded sprints to multi-month platform partnerships – you help your team navigate all of them.
Champion systems thinking.
Ensure your team builds for reuse and scale, not just the immediate ask.
Coach designers to diagnose root causes, not symptoms, and to build solutions designed to outlast their involvement.
Advocate for agentic prototyping practices.
Support your team in using modern AI-assisted prototyping workflows — tools like Cursor, Claude, and our proprietary prototyping environment — to build high-fidelity, functional prototypes that go beyond static mocks.
Model and encourage a bias toward motion over statics.
Represent Studio in cross-functional partnerships.
Be the design leadership voice in conversations with Brand, Design Systems, Engineering, and Product.
Ensure your team's work is well-positioned, understood, and adopted.
Evolve how Studio operates.
Own and improve the team's intake process, engagement model, documentation practices, and ways of working.
Build the operational infrastructure that lets strong IC work happen consistently.
Hire, manage, and develop a team of Product Designers working on cross-cutting systems and craft initiatives.
Set a clear and consistent quality bar for interaction, visual design, and systems thinking across all Studio engagements.
Oversee the delivery of high-impact Studio work from framing through production-ready output.
Partner with cross-functional leadership — product, engineering, brand, and research — to position Studio as a strategic design partner.
Drive team health, culture, and operational practices that enable consistent, high-quality output.
Contribute to UX Foundations leadership discussions on team strategy, resourcing, and organizational direction.