Staff Design Program Manager, Firefly

Adobe•San Jose, CA

10d•Hybrid

About The Position

We are looking for a Staff Design Program Manager to join the Firefly Design team within Adobe Design. You will partner with leaders across Product Design for AI products and Creative Pro Design who work with globally distributed teams. Your role will complement and support the leaders for our team's overarching goals and objectives. This is a rare opportunity to establish and lead the innovation operations practice for one of Adobe's highest-priority product organizations. Firefly sits at the intersection of generative AI and creative tools, and the design team is working in genuinely new territory. We need someone who has established operational processes for innovative initiatives, who knows how to create conditions for early-stage creative exploration and can bring rigor and repeatability to a space that is often treated as purely intuitive. There is no existing practice to inherit. You will build it.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in design operations, program management, or innovation strategy within a design and technology environment
Demonstrated experience building innovation operations from the ground up, not inheriting a practice, but establishing one
Deep fluency in innovation methodologies including design sprints, speculative design, futures thinking, and rapid prototyping, with the judgment to know when each is the right tool
Demonstrated experience navigating the tension between product maturation and ongoing innovation, helping organizations balance the demands of scale with continued evolution and growth
Experience coordinating across globally distributed design and product teams, with strong instincts for async-first communication and cross-timezone collaboration
Strong executive communication skills, with the ability to translate exploratory creative work into language that resonates with senior leadership without flattening its nuance
Ability to build trust quickly with design leadership and act as a genuine thought partner, not just an operational executor
Comfort with and curiosity about AI tools, including experience applying them to design or program management workflows
A portfolio of innovation programs or frameworks you have built, facilitated, and iterated on over time
Deep understanding of the product development lifecycle, including how design work moves through discovery, definition, and delivery, and where innovation processes must connect to ship-ready work without losing creative ambition
Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Responsibilities

Establish and lead the innovation operations practice for the Firefly Design team, including frameworks, rituals, and tools that enable consistent early-stage design exploration across a globally distributed organization
Design and facilitate design sprints, speculative design sessions, and futures thinking workshops that help the team move from ambiguous problem spaces to actionable design directions
Own pre-roadmap coordination by creating the operational connective tissue between research, design, and product in the space before features are formally scoped
Build repeatable intake, scoping, and synthesis processes for 0-to-1 programs so innovation work can be tracked, evaluated, and communicated to leadership without losing its exploratory nature
Partner with design leadership to define what innovation success looks like for Firefly, and establish the metrics and documentation practices to measure and report it
Serve as a strategic thought partner to design leads, helping them translate early-stage creative thinking into program structures that can move through the organization
Create alignment across design, product, engineering, and research by building shared language and process for how innovation work gets prioritized, staffed, and progressed
Represent and advocate for the Firefly design team's innovation portfolio to senior leadership, connecting exploratory work to broader organizational goals
Apply AI tooling to innovation workflows, from research synthesis to facilitation support to executive reporting, and help the design team build fluency in working this way
Partner with product and engineering leadership to map the full product development lifecycle for Firefly, and identify where design innovation input is needed at each stage to influence outcomes before decisions are locked