Sr Product Manager, Design Systems

Salesforce•San Francisco, CA

5h•Hybrid

About The Position

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. The Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) is the industry-defining, flagship framework that powers the user interfaces of the world's most trusted CRM. As a Senior Product Manager for SLDS, you will be the primary owner of platform health and roadmap across SLDS 1 and SLDS 2, ensuring our massive global base of developers and designers can build with confidence and give both pro-code developers and declarative builders the tools to make Salesforce their own. This is a craft-focused, execution-intensive role. You will work closely with engineering, design, and accessibility specialists to ship consistent, high-quality increments that keep SLDS the trusted foundation it has always been.

Requirements

5+ years of product management experience, with meaningful time on design systems, component libraries, developer tools, or frontend platforms at scale.
Deep understanding of CSS architecture, design tokens, and component-level styling. You can speak fluently with engineers about the tradeoffs of a styling API decision.
Genuine fluency bridging design and engineering: you understand the DOM, CSS, accessibility specs (ARIA, screen reader behavior), and Figma natively.
Experience writing rigorous acceptance criteria, managing agile backlogs, and leading cross-functional delivery.
Strong analytical instincts — comfortable interpreting telemetry, accessibility audits, and user research to drive prioritization.
Clear, concise communicator across technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on familiarity with SLDS, Lightning Web Components, or another enterprise-scale design system (e.g., Carbon, Fluent, Material, Spectrum).
Prior experience as a designer, front-end engineer, or design technologist. You've built with the system before you managed it.
Deep familiarity with design token architecture and tooling pipelines (e.g., Style Dictionary, Theo) and how tokens flow from design decisions to code.
Experience owning a component library, you understand the human and technical cost of breaking changes, and you are an accessibility champion.

Responsibilities

Shape the product roadmap for SLDS UI customization, covering both the pro-code to no-code/low-code user customization spectrum.
Define requirements and acceptance criteria for new styling capabilities, ensuring they work consistently and support the full spectrum of customer use cases from ISV partners to enterprise admins.
Collaborate deeply with design and engineering on strategy and execution.
Prioritize opportunities based on user insights, data, and business objectives, adapting quickly to evolving needs and signals.
Drive the product roadmap for the Design Systems website, the primary destination for developer and designer documentation, component references, and contribution guidance.
Define and prioritize improvements to maximize builder self-service and reduce support burden.
Collaborate with content, engineering, design and the broader community to keep documentation accurate, comprehensive, and up to date.
Own the backlog and release roadmap for SLDS 1 and SLDS 2: balancing new enhancements, bug resolution, technical debt, and ongoing compliance work to keep the system healthy and trustworthy at scale.
Maintain absolute backward compatibility; every update must seamlessly support existing customer implementations without disruption.
Collaborate with design tooling teams to ensure Figma UI kits, linters, and validators stay in sync with the component library.