Product Design Manager, Design Systems

Clio • Vancouver, BC

1d • CA$154,200 - CA$231,400 • Hybrid

About The Position

Clio is hiring a Product Design Manager to lead its Design Systems team. The role may be performed from anywhere in Canada except Quebec or from the United States. Employees located near the Burnaby, Calgary, or Toronto hubs are expected to work in the office at least twice a week on Anchor Days. The position reports to the Platform Product Design Director and manages Design Systems and product-led growth (PLG) designers.

This is a hands-on, player-coach leadership role. The manager will lead the design system's operating model, including its roadmap, intake, contributions, governance, versioning, and health measurement. They will help evolve the system into a structured, machine-readable source of truth for people and AI agents, and oversee reusable onboarding and PLG patterns that allow product teams to run growth and retention experiments.

The role works closely with Platform Engineering, Brand and Marketing, and design teams across Grow, Manage, Work, and Enterprise. It extends the system across web, mobile, and desktop while allowing platform-appropriate interactions, and supports brand theming, Enterprise white-label experiences, accessibility conformance, international launches, and AI-native product patterns. The manager will also lead customer-centered discovery and validation, track pattern performance, coach and grow the team, and use AI tools to accelerate exploration, documentation, and iteration.

Requirements

• 10 or more years of product design experience, including time at Staff, Principal, or Lead level.
• At least 2 years of experience managing designers or formally leading a design systems team.
• A track record of building and operating a design system at scale, including governance, contribution, and versioning across many product teams.
• Strong UX and visual craft, with deep knowledge of interaction design, information architecture, and accessibility, including WCAG 2.1 AA.
• Technical fluency with design tokens, component architecture, and front-end code, and experience working with platform engineers.
• Experience working with Brand and Marketing on brand expression, theming, or multi-brand systems.
• Experience designing AI-powered experiences, including patterns for trust, transparency, and appropriate user control.
• Strong product judgment and ability to connect system investments to customer and business outcomes, such as adoption, delivery speed, avoided cost, and revenue enabled.
• Fluency with modern design, prototyping, and AI tools, such as Claude, Figma, and Cursor.
• Ability to facilitate alignment among Product, Engineering, and Design peers, clarify the reasons behind decisions, and move teams through ambiguity.
• Experience making a design system machine-readable, including structured specifications, tokens as data, and documentation usable by agents and LLM tooling.
• Shipped patterns for AI-native experiences, such as streaming states, citations, confidence signals, refusals, error recovery, and human-in-the-loop approvals.
• Experience with localization-ready systems, including text expansion, date, number, and currency formats, and groundwork for right-to-left languages.
• Experience maintaining system coherence across web, mobile, and desktop.
• Experience designing or overseeing onboarding, trial, and upgrade patterns in a product-led growth motion.

Nice To Haves

• Background in content design or experience writing system-level voice and tone standards.
• Experience delivering accessibility conformance through a design system.
• Experience bringing acquired products onto a shared system.

Responsibilities

• Own the design system operating model, including roadmap, intake, contribution and review rules, versioning, and health metrics such as adoption, coverage, accessibility conformance, and consistency of agent-generated UI.
• Make the design system a machine-readable source of truth by structuring tokens, component specifications, usage rules, and content guidelines and linking them to code.
• Bring shared interaction patterns from Grow, Manage, Work, and Enterprise into the system, including common foundations for data visualization and charting.
• Guide patterns for conversational UI, streaming and confidence states, citations, and automation messages that communicate what ran, what needs approval, or what failed.
• Extend the system and its governance across web, mobile, and desktop, maintaining coherent brand and behavior while respecting platform-specific interactions.
• Partner with Brand and Marketing on brand expression and theming, including Enterprise white-label experiences, consumer and client portals, and Marketing reuse of the system.
• Work hands-on with front-end platform and design-system engineering on token pipelines, component APIs, design–code parity, and technical trade-offs.
• Oversee reusable onboarding, trial, upgrade, and contextual-growth patterns, partnering with PLG and Growth leads to support independent product-team experimentation.
• Align the system roadmap with accessibility conformance, international launches, and SMB, MM, and Enterprise timelines.
• Build discovery and validation into pattern development with internal users, customers, and consumers, and track patterns' performance in production.
• Hire, coach, and develop the team; set expectations, provide craft and behavior feedback, support career development, and run critiques, design reviews, and discovery workshops.
• Protect the team from outside noise and scope creep while maintaining quality and predictable delivery.
• Use AI in personal work and help the team use it to speed up exploration, documentation, and iteration.

Benefits

• Competitive, equitable salary.
• Top-tier health benefits, dental insurance, and vision insurance.
• Hybrid work environment; local employees are expected to be in the office at least twice per week.
• Flexible time off policy, with 20 days off per year encouraged.
• $2,000 annual counseling benefit.
• RRSP matching and RESP contribution.
• Clioversary recognition at 3, 5, 7, and 10 years.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed