Product Design Manager, Grafana Labs

• This role is suitable for candidates with a few years of Product Design people management experience as well as Staff+ product design individual contributors with strong experience leading, coaching, and mentoring other designers and a desire to take on people management responsibilities
• A well-rounded generalist product design skillset with a track record of shipping effective user experiences for complex B2B/enterprise software products
• Ability to coach, mentor, provide both positive and constructive feedback to, and inspire a diverse team of product designers in a remote-first setting
• Ability to build and leverage strong relationships with cross-functional partners and leaders across Engineering, Product Management, Documentation, and other functions
• Ability to lead teams in developing artifacts, processes, and ways of working that improve cross-functional product development practices
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and interpersonal skills
• A balanced leadership style characterized by a combination of kindness, pragmatism, and a focus on driving business impact
• Ability to model and exemplify Grafana cultural values

Desirable

• As a Product Design Manager at Grafana Labs, you will join a growing Product Design organization of more than 25 designers, researchers, and design leaders distributed across five continents.
• You will be working within a 100% remote R&D organization, so strong, proactive remote communication, collaboration, facilitation, and relationship building skills will be essential to your success
• Design leadership
• You will operate as a leader within the R&D organization at Grafana representing the Product Design function. You will own, define, communicate, and drive execution on product design strategy in support of overall product and business strategy for your team’s part of the Grafana product surface
• You will work closely with your cross-functional peers across Engineering, Product Management, Documentation and Tech Writing, and other R&D functions (at Grafana we refer to these functions as EPD+ for short). You may also work with senior leadership and stakeholders in GTM and other functions at Grafana
• You will build strong working relationships with these peers, leaders, and stakeholders to help leverage our Product Design capabilities to achieve product and business goals
• Team leadership
• You will own the Product Design staffing strategy for your remit and be the reporting manager for a small team of 4-5 product designers. You will work to ensure that the designers on your team are effectively supporting the EPD+ squads they are embedded with. To this end, you will continually work with EPD+ collaborators and leaders to unblock your team members’ progress and collect, synthesize, and share feedback on your team members’ performance
• You will work closely with the rest of the Product Design leadership team to identify staffing gaps in Product Design support coverage across the Grafana product surface. You will explore opportunities to fill these through internal people movement and/or external hiring, working with our Recruiting team to execute on hiring processes in an effective and equitable way
• You may occasionally leverage your own IC Product Design skillset to contribute hands on either to design strategy artifact creation or, when a short-term staffing gap exists on a high-priority project, to design execution within an EPD+ cross-functional squad
• Team building
• You will work with the IC designers on your team to help them define the product design direction for their projects and execute on it with their EPD+ partners. You will coach and mentor your reports in various aspects of the product design skillset. You will also provide actionable and specific feedback to your reports and set stretch goals for them to continually improve performance
• You will be available, approachable, and skilled at building strong working relationships with your reports. Leveraging these relationships, you will help your reports define short and longer term career goals, map out their career progression, and progress in areas of strength, developmental areas, and areas of interest
• You will evaluate and communicate the performance of your reports on an ongoing basis and capture these evaluations formally in performance reviews. You will also evaluate your reports’ readiness for promotions and advocate for this when appropriate
• Ultimately, you will understand the challenges and opportunities of managing a highly diverse and distributed design team. You will use this understanding to build a positive team culture that fosters psychological safety, encourages innovation and experimentation, embraces failure, celebrates successes, and enables your team to achieve greater impact than the sum of its parts