Sr Manager, Experience Design (Agentic & Conversational Product Design)

Pfizer • St. Louis, MO

9d • Hybrid

About The Position

At Pfizer, our mission is to create breakthroughs that change patients' lives, and we are expanding our ability to do so with an innovative new operating model. We are looking for a Senior Manager of User Experience to play a pivotal role in this shift by leading the design efforts within our Forward Impact Teams (FIT Pods). This role will focus on utilizing cutting-edge AI tools, rapid prototyping, and an iterative, lean-team approach to create high-impact proof of concept solutions in a matter of days rather than weeks. You will work closely with developers, strategists, and cross-functional stakeholders to rapidly iterate on digital products and bring them to market faster and more cost-effectively than ever before. This is an exciting opportunity to design within a dynamic environment where the speed of innovation is critical and the ability to influence change and help define the future of design operations will be essential. Operating at the intersection of customer insights, design systems, and product delivery, you will advance concepts into validated solutions that enable decision-making to scale across the enterprise. You will be responsible for creating, maintaining, and evolving design standards, ensuring accessibility compliance, and delivering solutions that meet both technical rigor and customer needs. Your role focuses on hands-on proactive and creative thinking/solutioning, establishing a clear design vision utilizing new technologies and systems, and ensuring your prototypes are built, tested, and refined efficiently within days. As a Senior Manager of Experience Design, you’ll be a strategic leader with a clear design vision, a deep understanding of and practical skills to create AI-driven design experiences, and proven expertise in designing under tight constraints. You'll not only manage the design process but also ensure that your FIT members deliver high-quality MVPs with speed and precision while challenging the status quo and proving that design can be fast, efficient, and scalable within our internal tools. This role specifically requires experience designing Agentic AI and Conversational UX (LLM-enabled assistants), not only traditional UI/visual design. You will design how AI systems behave, communicate, and act, balancing autonomy, human-in-the-loop controls, transparency, safety, and trust, while also operating as a product-minded designer who can shape strategy, define hypotheses, and influence roadmaps.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Design or related field
• 6+ years of progressive UX design experience, with a proven track record in delivering high-impact digital products and experiences
• Extensive experience working with AI-driven design tools and platforms, with a deep understanding of how to leverage them for rapid prototyping and iterative design
• "AI-first" mindset with a proven willingness to challenge traditional design paradigms and adopt augmented workflows to radically accelerate delivery cycles
• Demonstrate experience designing Conversational UX (chat and/or voice), including dialog flows, conversation state, repair/fallback patterns, escalation, and tone/voice guidelines
• Demonstrate experience designing Agentic AI workflows (systems that can take actions via tools/functions), including human-in-the-loop controls, approvals, transparency, and safe failure modes
• Strong experience in managing teams in fast-paced, high-pressure environments, driving the creation of MVPs and proof-of-concepts that meet both business and user needs
• Expertise in leading design strategy and execution for a wide variety of digital products, from ideation to delivery
• A robust portfolio demonstrating experience with system-level design thinking, AI-powered experiences, and rapid prototyping techniques
• Expertise in accessibility and inclusive design, with hands-on experience ensuring WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across a wide variety of digital platforms
• Proven ability to deliver complex design projects under tight deadlines with a focus on speed, efficiency, and quality
• Exceptional communication skills, including the ability to present and justify design decisions to senior leadership and diverse stakeholder groups
• Strong analytical skills with the ability to interpret data and translate insights into actionable product decisions
• Demonstrated ability to lead without authority through ambiguity and deliver high-impact solutions quickly
• Candidate demonstrates a breadth of diverse leadership experiences and capabilities including: the ability to influence and collaborate with peers, develop and coach others, oversee and guide the work of other colleagues to achieve meaningful outcomes and create business impact

Nice To Haves

• Background in designing for AI-driven user experiences or technologies, particularly in complex, dynamic environments
• Strong product design experience (not only UI): partnering with Product/Engineering to shape scope, prioritize tradeoffs, and define measurable outcomes
• Familiarity with front-end development principles, with a deep understanding of technical constraints and opportunities when designing for digital products
• Previous experience with design systems at scale and a track record of developing and maintaining design systems for large organizations
• Expertise in working within lean or agile environments, ideally in a startup-like atmosphere with a focus on iterative testing and fast-paced product cycles
• Previous experience designing within the healthcare or pharmaceutical sectors is a plus
• Strong knowledge of service design, journey mapping, or customer experience frameworks
• Experience with LLM product patterns
• Experience defining responsible AI UX patterns: transparency/disclosures, explainability cues, privacy boundaries, and trust/safety guardrails
• Experience with AI experience evaluation approaches: conversation quality testing, scenario-based risk testing, and iterative improvement loops tied to product metrics
• Strong digital literacy and an "AI-first" mental model, with the ability to critically evaluate and integrate generative tools into the creative process to solve complex design challenges at scale
• Ability to manage multiple complex programs and projects simultaneously
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

Responsibilities

• Design Delivery & Execution
• Be a vocal, engaged, proactive, and hands-on partner and thought leader within a cross-functional team (engineers, strategists) in delivering rapid prototypes that solve high-priority business problems, utilizing AI-driven design and internal tools to drastically reduce traditional design timelines.
• Collaborate intimately with Product and Engineering teams to rapidly iterate and produce MVPs and proof of concepts that can validate business ideas within days.
• Deliver end-to-end design for high-impact projects under tight deadlines, ensuring alignment with business goals, user needs, and technical feasibility.
• Create dynamic, interactive prototypes optimized for cross-platform functionality, using internal tools and AI technologies to validate concepts quickly and gather actionable insights.
• Ensure accessibility compliance (WCAG 2.1 AA) across all designs, championing inclusive design practices for diverse user needs.
• Lead by example in design quality, from medium-fidelity wireframes to high-fidelity interactive prototypes, while maintaining a strong focus on efficiency and rapid iteration.
• Flex across pods based on demand, providing surge support during peak periods
• Agentic & Conversational Experience Design (Core)
• Lead the design of Agentic AI experiences where systems can plan, make decisions, call tools/functions, and complete multi-step workflows with humans in the loop.
• Own Conversational UX end-to-end (chat and/or voice): dialog flows, intents, entities, conversation state, turn-taking, confirmations, error recovery/repair, escalation to human support, and safe fallback behaviors.
• Design and document assistant behaviors (tone/voice, grounded responses, refusal patterns, transparency cues, “why this happened” explanations, and trust-building interaction patterns).
• Partner with Engineering/Data/AI to shape LLM-enabled experiences
• Create prototypes that simulate agent behavior not only static screens to validate workflows and risks quickly.
• Design Operations & Systems
• Drive the integration of internal design systems, ensuring reusability and consistency across all prototypes and digital products.
• Extend the design system for AI-first patterns (assistant UI components, conversation templates, transparency/disclosure components, escalation patterns, and trust/verification cues)
• Continuously evaluate and refine design processes to accelerate delivery, focusing on the reduction of external tool licensing costs and eliminating the need for external agencies.
• Build and maintain detailed design documentation, including templates, components, guidelines, and design specifications to ensure efficiency and scalability.
• Establish key performance metrics (velocity, quality, adoption) to track the impact of design initiatives on business objectives.
• Ensure clear and actionable feedback loops between teams and stakeholders, creating a structured approach to design reviews and revisions.
• Leverage AI tools to streamline the design handoff process, collaborating with the engineering team to ensure smooth transitions from prototype to production.
• Capability Building & Enablement
• Create reusable playbooks and pattern libraries for agentic workflows and conversational design (e.g., escalation, repair, safety responses, approvals, and multi-step task orchestration).
• Proactively train and mentor designers and cross-functional partners on the rapid prototyping process, AI tools, and internal design systems.
• Champion a culture of continuous learning by encouraging innovative thinking, experimenting with new design techniques, and sharing best practices.
• Develop self-service templates, starter kits, and design patterns that enable non-designers to create basic prototypes independently, accelerating delivery timelines across the organization.
• Lead design workshops to promote knowledge sharing and align teams on best practices for AI-powered design, rapid iteration, and lean development processes.
• Mentor and grow junior designers, fostering a high-performing and adaptive design culture that thrives on experimentation and creative problem-solving.
• Strategic Leadership
• Serve as the primary advocate for design within the FIT Pods, aligning design goals with business objectives and ensuring that rapid prototyping efforts are focused on generating measurable impact.
• Take ownership of the overall design strategy and execution within the pods, driving decisions with a focus on speed, cost-efficiency, and delivering value to the user and the business.
• Provide thought leadership on AI-first design strategies, pushing boundaries on how design processes can be augmented with AI tools to accelerate timelines and improve quality.
• Develop and present high-level strategic recommendations to senior leadership, clearly articulating the value of rapid prototyping and AI-powered design in achieving business goals.
• Help shape the evolving design operating model to ensure alignment with business needs while maintaining a focus on simplicity, efficiency, and scalability.
• Act as a product-minded design strategist: frame problems, define hypotheses, influence roadmaps with Product partners, and connect design decisions to measurable outcomes (e.g., task success, adoption, time-to-resolution, trust/quality indicators).
• Support continuous improvement loops for AI experiences (conversation testing, scenario-based risk testing/red teaming inputs, prompt/flow regression considerations, and quality measurement in partnership with Product/Engineering).

Benefits

• We offer comprehensive and generous benefits and programs to help our colleagues lead healthy lives and to support each of life’s moments. Benefits offered include a 401(k) plan with Pfizer Matching Contributions and an additional Pfizer Retirement Savings Contribution, paid vacation, holiday and personal days, paid caregiver/parental and medical leave, and health benefits to include medical, prescription drug, dental and vision coverage.

What This Job Offers

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