Product Design Manager, Vertical Experiences

BetterUp•Austin, TX

16h•$190,000 - $260,000•Remote

About The Position

This role is a player-coach position where the Product Design Manager will manage and mentor a pod of four product designers. The pod is responsible for BetterUp’s core coaching experiences across member, partner, and coach surfaces. The manager will oversee design operations for their pod while ensuring craft standards are maintained across their area. The pod's responsibilities cover four interconnected surface areas: Partner experience (Partner Hub, Performance Intelligence, and Buyer), Individual coaching (Manage, Lead, and Ready), Group coaching (Dare to Lead, Guided Journey, and Team tooling), and Coach experience (the professional platform coaches use to manage their practice). The role requires ensuring coherence and quality across these diverse areas, each needing a different design lens.

Requirements

5+ years of product design experience, including people management experience (this is typically a first-time manager role)
Experience managing product designers across multiple product areas simultaneously
Strong systems thinking—the surfaces you own span B2B, B2C, and two-sided interactions
A track record of getting design upstream, not just executing on PM direction
Comfort operating without perfect information in a fast-moving environment
Player-coach mindset—craft and taste are as important as management skills
Proficiency with Figma and modern design tools; familiarity with prototyping and design systems workflows
Experience with AI-powered design tools and workflows (e.g., AI-assisted prototyping, generative design, AI-powered user research analysis)

Nice To Haves

Experience designing for coaching, health, or human development platforms
Familiarity with enterprise B2B design patterns and complex administrative workflows
Experience with two-sided marketplace or platform design
Background integrating AI capabilities into product experiences

Responsibilities

Manage and develop four direct reports across multiple time zones, with consistent 1:1s, actionable feedback, and individualized growth support
Run design operations for your pod: review cadence, Figma hygiene, handoff standards, and sprint participation
Ensure design is in the room at kickoff—before the PRD is written, not after
Enforce sign-off gates before work moves to engineering, maintaining quality and consistency across your surfaces
Partner directly with VP Product counterparts for Partner, Coach, and Member pods to align on priorities and tradeoffs
Surface experience quality issues across your surfaces and bring them to weekly design review
Contribute to team-wide rituals: cross-pod critiques, design jams, and quarterly dogfooding
Maintain craft standards as a player-coach—you are still a designer, not just a manager; taste and collaboration with growth, core, AI, and design systems teams matter
Model openness to AI-powered change and encourage teammates to try new ways of working
Adopt new AI tools with curiosity, help the team unlearn outdated habits, and support emotional resilience during AI-driven transition
Create a psychologically safe environment for the team to experiment with AI tools and share both successes and failures
Actively use AI in your own design work and transparently share your process with the team