Sr PM/Director of Product Management, Design Systems

Salesforce•San Francisco, CA

6d•$207,800 - $344,700•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 the Director of Product Management for Design Systems, your primary responsibility is owning this flagship design system, driving its core feature roadmap, and maintaining its industry-leading trust, performance, and accessibility KPIs. Secondarily, as we continue to lead the industry into the agentic enterprise era, you will design the strategic evolution of this trusted framework. Your mission is to develop a clear, stable path that brings our massive base of existing customers along on the agentic journey. You will guide the transition of SLDS from a highly successful, traditional component library into an intelligent "system of systems" that enables humans and AI agents to co-create great experiences together—with the absolute trust, reliability, and security Salesforce is known for.

Requirements

5+ years of software product management experience, with experience in design systems, component libraries, web/mobile platforms, or developer-facing products at scale.
Deep understanding of design systems principles, CSS custom properties/styling hooks, design tokens, responsive layout engines, and frontend component architecture (such as React, Web Components, or Lightning Web Components).
Understand the DOM, CSS, accessibility specs (ARIA, screen reader optimization), and Figma tooling natively.
Strong working knowledge of LLMs, agentic workflows, prompt-driven interfaces, and semantic data models.
Ability to conceptualize how AI changes user interaction models from static clicks to conversational relationships.
Master storyteller who can synthesize highly technical, architectural, and design paradigms into compelling narratives for executive stakeholders, customers, and engineering partners alike.
Ability to build high-trust relationships, navigate complex organizational politics, and align diverse stakeholders toward a unified user experience vision.
Excellence in managing agile backlogs, defining rigorous acceptance criteria, and making difficult trade-offs between long-term system health and immediate business demands.
Highly analytical mindset with a proven ability to leverage telemetry, telemetry-driven insights, user research, and cohort analysis to optimize adoption.
Passionate about emerging UX/UI trends, design system standards, and the evolution of human-computer interaction (HCI) in the era of artificial intelligence.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on familiarity with the Salesforce Lightning Platform, Metadata API, or the Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS).
Previously defined product requirements for developer IDE plugins, design-to-code translation tools, or visual customizers/theming engines.
Led cross-functional platform initiatives across highly matrixed, global organizations spanning multiple time zones and business divisions.
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) or Salesforce Certified Administrator credentials are a plus.

Responsibilities

Own the Core Feature Roadmap: Lead the product lifecycle, feature prioritization, and execution roadmap for our flagship design system (SLDS), ensuring it continues to serve the evolving needs of our massive global developer and designer ecosystems.
Champion Trust & Accessibility (A11y): Act as the ultimate custodian of system trust. Ensure all core components strictly adhere to global accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2/3.0, Section 508) and enterprise-grade performance and security benchmarks.
Ensure Absolute Stability: Prioritize backward compatibility and system reliability, making certain that improvements and feature updates to the flagship platform seamlessly support existing customer implementations without disruption.
Evolve the Trusted System: Define and build the long-term product strategy to transform our design system into an intelligent interface layer capable of supporting conversational and agentic enterprise experiences.
Bridge the Agentic Gap: Map out pragmatic migration strategies and adoption frameworks to help our existing enterprise customers safely transition their traditional user experiences into next-generation, AI-assisted interfaces.
Develop Semantic Metadata Schemas: Partner with engineering, UX research, and AI platform teams to design the metadata schemas, structural ontologies, and component specifications that will eventually allow Large Language Models (LLMs) to safely interact with and render UI components at runtime.
Enable "Pro-to-No-Code" Theming: Drive tools and platform features (such as flexible styling hooks, unstyled primitives, and AI-assisted customization) that allow both developers and no-code builders to adapt the design system to their brand identity.
Act as the Central Liaison: Serve as the chief advocate and trusted advisor for design systems across the enterprise, driving deep alignment between central UX platform teams, distributed product business units, and emerging AI platform groups.
Cultivate Community Contribution: Scale the inner-source contribution model, enabling distributed designers and engineers to contribute patterns back to the central system while keeping the core library highly cohesive and performant.
Enable Ecosystem Partners: Collaborate with third-party software vendors, integration partners, and the broader developer ecosystem to deliver tools—such as component libraries and Figma UI kits—that ensure external applications look and feel natively integrated.
Supercharge Creator Workflows: Define requirements for designer- and developer-facing tooling, such as UI code validators, linters, Figma plugins, and interactive playgrounds/documentation environments (e.g., Storybook) to maximize builder velocity and automated quality assurance.
Measure System Health: Establish, track, and report on key success metrics for the design system, balancing developer adoption rates, system performance telemetry, builder satisfaction (NPS), and accessibility compliance scores.