Senior Manager, Product Design (New York, NY)

B Lab • New York, NY

2d • $134,000 - $143,000 • Remote

About The Position

B Lab is seeking a Senior Product Design Manager to provide strategic leadership, stability, and coherence across the product design function supporting B Corp Certification and related product experiences in B Impact. This role is accountable for the growth of design maturity within the organization, the quality and consistency of design output, and the effectiveness of design as a trusted strategic partner to Product, Engineering, Commercial, Standards, Operations and the wider organization. This role ensures that every digital and service touchpoint is built around genuine customer needs. It elevates design and user research to first-class capabilities within B Lab. This is a leadership and management role, not a permanent squad assignment. The Manager won't be embedded in a single squad, but will actively support squads as needed, jumping in to unblock, provide direction on complex problems, and strengthen design contribution across the board. A core part of this role is shaping how design, product, and engineering work together within the shared squad model, establishing the ways of working, collaboration norms, and delivery practices that make cross-functional teams effective. Product and Experience design at B Lab is a small but growing discipline, and this role will be instrumental in building it out. You will grow and develop the team, including design and research capability, and establish how Product Design, Service Design, and Research work together as an integrated practice. This means being accountable not just for the quality of design output, but for how the function is structured, developing a customer research function, gathering and using insight to inform design decisions, and sharing what has been learned from customers to be leveraged across the organization.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in product design, UX, or service design — including at least 2 years in a lead or management role
• Strategic Thinking: connects design decisions to product strategy and long-term user impact
• People Management: experience coaching, developing, and managing designers at different levels
• User-Centered Design (UCD): knowledge of prototyping, usability testing, and applying UCD principles to create user-friendly products that meet business objectives.
• Extensive experience in Lean UX
• Product & Interaction Design: a credible design leader with a strong practitioner background in UX/UI and interaction design, able to set the quality bar, provide authoritative design direction, and earn the trust of the team through depth of craft knowledge
• User Research: Ability to provide direction and development B Lab’s research function, with previous hands-on experience including interviews and synthesis of findings, to drive informed product decisions.
• Service Design: familiarity with journey mapping, service blueprinting, and systems thinking across digital and non-digital touch points
• Accessibility & Inclusive Design: working knowledge of WCAG standards and a practical understanding of what inclusive, globally accessible design looks like across diverse languages, cultures, and connectivity contexts
• Design Operations & Systems: experience establishing or maturing design operations, including design system governance, tooling (Figma), workflows, and handoff standards
• Tech tools: demonstrable proficiency in Miro or FigJam, Jira, Confluence, usability testing platforms (Optimal Workshop, UseBerry or equivalent), Figma and design system tooling within Figma
• Collaboration & Design Thinking: brings a design thinking mindset to cross-functional work, facilitating teams through ambiguity, aligning diverse stakeholders around user needs, and turning complex problems into clear, actionable directions
• Communication & Negotiation: clearly communicates priorities, intent, and trade-offs across the business, working with product and organisational stakeholders to align on direction, navigate competing demands, and ensure design quality and intent are understood and championed at every level
• Adaptability: Navigates change and iterates based on learning and feedback
• Stakeholder Management: manages and champions design and customer needs across a wide stakeholder landscape, owning the design process, maintaining a clear point of view, and confidently pushing back when decisions risk compromising user experience or design intent
• Human-centred approach that blends creativity, analytical thinking, and strong cross-functional collaboration
• Deep user empathy, grounding innovation and prioritisation in real user needs, behaviours, and outcomes
• Systems thinker and strategic problem solver, able to connect user experience, operational realities, and organisational goals
• Highly comfortable navigating complexity, ambiguity, and competing priorities in fast-moving environments
• Strong judgment and prioritisation skills, balancing strategic thinking with pragmatic delivery needs

Nice To Haves

• Proficiency in service design tools
• Proficiency in analytics platforms (we use PostHog)
• Research repository tools (we use UseBerry)
• Comfort with AI tooling (Figma AI, Claude code...)

Responsibilities

• Advocate for design's role across B Lab by raising organizational understanding of what design contributes, when it should be involved, and how design maturity improves product outcomes. This includes educating non-design leaders, embedding design earlier in discovery, and making the value of design visible through outcomes, not just outputs.
• Lead and grow a high-performing design and research team through coaching, mentoring, hiring, and career development
• Establish clear ways of working, decision-making, and team responsibilities to support effective collaboration and sustainable delivery
• Act as the central design lead across the organization, helping prioritize requests, protect team focus, and represent design in leadership and planning discussions
• Partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership to align design capacity, team priorities, and delivery outcomes
• Foster a strong culture of craft, feedback, continuous learning, psychological safety, and user-centred design practices across the organization
• Own design quality and consistency across all squads by defining and maintaining clear standards for what “good” looks like
• Provide strategic design direction on complex, cross-squad experiences and contribute hands-on UX/UI work where needed to unblock or elevate outcomes
• Establish and reinforce core design practices, including how work is initiated, reviewed, handed off to engineering, and collaborated on with Product and stakeholders
• Champion accessibility and inclusive design standards to ensure experiences work well for a diverse, global user base across contexts and constraints
• Lead the maturation and operationalisation of B Lab’s design system, including establishing the standards, foundations, governance models, and contribution practices needed across all digital touchpoints
• Improve design operations, including Figma tooling, workflows, handoff processes, naming conventions, and team practices
• Partner with Product and Engineering to establish effective and consistent ways of working and oversee design QA, ensuring shipped products reflect intended designs across squads
• Build a culture of high-quality experience design through feedback loops, and progressive adoption as the design system matures
• Support with Product leadership to shape and govern the product development lifecycle, establishing clear principles that connect discovery, design, and delivery, and ensuring user research and insights actively inform prioritisation and roadmap decisions
• In the near-to-medium term, help establish and mature the organisation’s research capability. This responsibility is intended to support the formation of a more dedicated research function or peer capability over time, with the role’s focus expected to evolve off of research and more heavily toward design operations, quality, and design leadership as the organisation matures

Benefits

• Excellent health benefits package including access to medical, vision and dental coverage
• Paid time off for vacation
• Additional paid time off for organizational closures
• 403(b) with a match of up to 3%
• Unlimited sick and personal time
• 40 hours paid time off for community service
• Paid parental leave
• Time and budget for professional development

What This Job Offers

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