Sr Product Design Manager, Document Cloud

Adobe•San Jose, CA

3d•Remote

About The Position

The opportunity Liquid Mode reimagined how people read documents on mobile. Acrobat AI Assistant, named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2024, lets users have a real-time conversation with a PDF. And in 2026, we introduced a feature enabling the generation of polished presentations and personal podcast-style audio summaries directly from documents. These all came from this team — and there's a lot more where that came from. We're searching for someone who is genuinely motivated by that sentence. They have experience in the 0-to-1 space, whether at an AI-first startup, an incubator, or anywhere the brief was simply to "figure this out," and they want to do it again at Adobe's scale. As a Senior Design Manager, you'll lead a team passionate about developing new AI-powered experiences for business professionals. You will work from early concepts through to shipped products. You will explore new AI-powered modalities like voice and others just starting to develop. You will invent capabilities that change how business professionals work, communicate, and complete tasks. You'll work directly alongside AI researchers and machine learning engineers right from the beginning, crafting what's possible before the requirements even exist. And you'll play an active role in crafting what it means to lead an AI-native team committed to building stellar user experiences. You will help establish new models for how Design, Research, Product and Engineering collaborate in an AI-first world.

Requirements

Several years of experience managing and mentoring product designers, with a strong track record of developing people and delivering quality work
Demonstrated experience in early-stage, exploratory product spaces — 0-to-1 work is core to this role, not a nice-to-have
A resourceful, entrepreneurial approach: you figure things out, you unblock yourself and your team, and you don't wait for perfect conditions
Comfort building prototypes yourself and a willingness to stay hands-on with the work
Strong communication with the ability to tell a clear story to engineers, PMs, and executives alike
Experience partnering closely with cross-functional teams through the full product lifecycle — from discovery to delivery
Hands-on familiarity with AI tools in your own design practice and a genuine curiosity about where the technology is going

Nice To Haves

Background at an AI-first startup or within an incubator or innovation lab at a larger company
Experience designing for or leading teams working on Android or mobile-first products
Exposure to designing AI-assisted or agentic workflows

Responsibilities

Lead and do. Guide a focused team of product designers — setting direction, removing obstacles, and improving the craft and quality.
Navigate ambiguity. Help your team find clarity in early-stage, loosely defined problem spaces — turning open-ended briefs into actionable design directions.
Pioneer AI-first ways of working. Actively experiment with and help define how your squad integrates AI tools into research, ideation, prototyping, and critique workflows. Share what you learn across the broader design organization.
Collaborate at the frontier. Partner directly with AI research scientists and ML engineers to shape new experiences from the earliest moments of possibility.
Move fast without sacrificing craft. Set a high bar for quality while building the habits that let your team ship quickly and iterate in the open.
Communicate design thinking clearly. Represent your team's work across all levels of the organization, from working sessions to senior leadership reviews.
Develop your people. Build a team environment grounded in honest feedback, continuous learning, and real ownership.