Product Designer, Design Systems (Governance Specialist)

Ford Motor • Dearborn, MI

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

Digital Product Design (DPD) at Ford is committed to envisioning and creating simple, thoughtful, enjoyable, and compelling product experiences that our customers need and love. We work in close partnership with product and engineering to deliver best-in-class interactions experiences that meet the needs of people today, and in the future. Our team is comprised of a dynamic group of product designers, researchers, visual designers, industrial designers, modelers, and project managers. We’re looking for a thoughtful, detail-oriented Product Designer specializing in design system governance. You’ll help ensure our design system remains scalable, consistent, and trusted across Ford’s vehicle software and mobile apps. The Design Systems team creates shared components, tokens, patterns, and guidelines that support high-quality digital experiences. In this role, you’ll help teams understand and apply system standards, improve governance and production workflows, and ensure system changes are discoverable and adopted in product work. You’ll partner with designers, product teams, engineering, and accessibility to align priorities and resolve issues across platforms. A portfolio submission, in addition to a resume, is required for consideration.

Requirements

• A portfolio submission, in addition to a resume, is required for consideration.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent
• 3+ years of product design experience, including meaningful experience with a design system at scale.
• Understand Atomic Design principles, component architecture, and design tokens.
• Familiarity with how design systems map to front-end code and tools such as Figma or Storybook.
• Experience reviewing designs or systems for consistency, accessibility (WCAG), and quality.
• Strong communication, documentation, and facilitation skills, including the ability to build consensus without direct authority.
• A systems-thinking mindset and ability to balance shared standards with product-team flexibility.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with governance or analytics tools, such as token management platforms, component usage tracking, or linting tools.

Responsibilities

• Review feature designs and proposed components or patterns for consistency, accessibility, and alignment with system standards.
• Maintain governance practices, including contribution guidelines, review processes, versioning, deprecation, and component lifecycle documentation.
• Support intake and prioritization of system requests; prepare review sessions and track decisions, actions, and dependencies.
• Audit the system for gaps, drift, redundant patterns, outdated components, and accessibility issues; help drive improvements.
• Keep documentation and migration guidance clear, discoverable, and up to date.
• Track adoption and system health, surfacing trends and opportunities for improvement.
• Socialize governance practices and partner with teams to align roadmaps, resolve questions, and ensure changes land predictably in product work.
• Identify governance gaps, develop proposals and workstreams, and help improve operating models and production workflows.
• Share best practices and support the growth of teammates working within the system.

Benefits

• Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up child care and more
• Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, and more
• Vehicle discount program for employees and family members and management leases
• Tuition assistance
• Established and active employee resource groups
• Paid time off for individual and team community service
• A generous schedule of paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day
• Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level