Product Design Manager, Self Serve

Airtable•San Francisco, CA

10d

About The Position

Airtable is the no-code app platform that empowers people closest to the work to accelerate their most critical business processes. More than 500,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100, rely on Airtable to transform how work gets done. Airtable is the AI-native app platform that empowers people closest to the work to accelerate their most critical business processes. More than 500,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100, rely on Airtable to transform how work gets done. Our Self Serve team owns the growth engine of Airtable - how people discover value, adopt AI native workflows, and become long-term customers. We focus on onboarding, activation, conversion, expansion, and monetization across the product experience. We’re looking for a Product Design Manager to lead design for Funnel & Monetization. We're hiring a product design manager to lead this team while staying close to the craft of design: you'll split your time between people leadership and hands-on design. You’ll partner deeply across Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to create experiences that are intuitive, cohesive, and measurably effective.

Requirements

You've managed designers before. 1-2 years of prior experience means that you’ve given feedback that changed someone's work, navigated a hard conversation, and started developing your own management style.
Your design craft is strong and current. You produce work you're proud of and can articulate why it's good. You've shipped features that required both strategic thinking and close attention to detail, and you want to keep doing that.
You're energized by both sides of the role. You see how leading a team and doing the work are complementary, can manage your time across both, and have a point of view on it.
You like saying "we" more than "I". Your team and functional partners will be a collaborative bunch, and you’ll be working closely with PMs, engineering, designers, other managers, PMMs, and more. We are greater than the sum of our parts.
You just go for it. There are lots of opportunities to have a measurable impact as a self-starter here. You don't hesitate to champion a good idea until it turns into something that works.
You enjoy leading in a dynamic environment. Airtable is evolving quickly. We’re looking for people who can motivate and keep momentum through uncertainty
You inspire your colleagues to be the best versions of themselves
We genuinely admire and respect each other which motivates us to show up as our best selves and take pride in the work we do together.

Responsibilities

Lead and develop your team
Manage 1-3 product designers: give them clear ownership, direct feedback, and the support they need to grow and do their best work.
Own your team's feedback culture. Set a high bar in a way that's constructive - your designers should know what good looks like and feel equipped to get there.
Know each person's growth edges. Give feedback that's specific, create stretch opportunities, and invest in their development.
Manage resourcing for your area: scope work to match capacity, flag tradeoffs early, and protect your team from overload.
Shape strategy with your cross-functional partners
Partner with PM and engineering leads to define roadmaps and success metrics, in addition to executing against them. Design has a voice in what and how something gets built.
Use design-led exploration - early concepts, AI prototyping, jams - to help your team define the problem and solution space.
Contribute as an individual designer
Own end-to-end design for significant work in your area, from problem framing through final details, alongside your team's projects.
Set the quality bar through your own output as much as through feedback.
Stay close enough to the work that your perspective is sharp and grounded in the nuances of specific business and technical inputs.