Senior Design Program Manager - Design Systems
New York, NY

Job Description

We are looking for a Senior Design Program Manager to join the Design Platform team at Spotify - a group that enables all of Spotify to build cohesive, user-centered products, by maintaining a unified design system and cultivating a thriving design community.

Your key focus area will be leading our cross-team initiative to refresh Spotify's design system, working with teams of designers, engineers and product managers to create a system and home for the tools, guidelines, components, and patterns that we use to build 'Spotify' for our users.

You'll establish efficient and effective working practices between the teams that contribute to our design systems, and amplify the effectiveness of this complex, cross-disciplinary program. Your secondary focus will be streamlining our design tools and help the design operations team establish best practices in how we use these tools or expand the set to keep us innovating.

The role is based in New York, with teams in Stockholm, London and Boston, so some travel will be required.

What you'll do

Working with design and tech leadership and several cross functional squads including product managers, engineers, designers, UX writers, researchers and data scientists, you will help drive and own outcomes for the Spotify design system and tools initiatives, a key pillar of our design operations strategy. You will have a broad array of responsibilities including:

* Designing and facilitating processes to track and communicate progress across the program of work, ensuring teams are on track.
* Help define roles and responsibilities and facilitate decision-making, surface risks and challenges, and help resolve blockers.
* Drive the overall system roadmap: helping teams define scope, deliverables, and schedules, and coordinating release planning across multiple teams for multiple stakeholders
* Create and socialise processes for how designers and engineers will adopt and contribute to the system
* Organise roadshows and trainings on the design system to our product teams
* Define and track KPIs to monitor the success of the design system product and find creative ways to help the system teams connect with their objectives.
* Oversee project/program reviews, planning sessions, off-sites and other team events
* Enable continuous improvement during the project, ensuring insights are captured, shared, and integrated
* Keep up to date with the latest design trends and tools and make proposals about why Spotify should invest in new tools, and how we make them work for our teams' ways of working.

Who you are

* It is essential you have extensive experience working in program management roles working with both design and engineering teams. Experience working with large design teams (20+) is especially key.
* You have a background and experience in delivering products to market.
* You understand the role of design systems in large product companies. Ideally you have managed teams who have set one up or have worked with teams who are active users of a system.
* You're a great communicator and bring clarity to the projects you take on: defining goals and success measures, freeing up lines of communication, identifying and removing blockers, encouraging collaboration, and most importantly, continuously looking for ways to improve how we work.
* You have practical experience with agile and lean principles, and techniques.
* You have experience running large, cross-functional programs and can easily communicate status at a moments notice.
* You're flexible, and use your judgment to apply the model and approach that best fit with the context.
* You're the glue of a happy, productive, cross-functional team; making space for the creative work across all disciplines to happen in a transparent, open environment

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. This is something we value deeply and we encourage everyone to come be a part of changing the way the world listens to music and audio.