Senior Product Design Manager, Khan Academy
$181.7-227.1k
$245,471 - $306,839 CAD. The salary offered will depend on internal pay equity and the candidate’s relevant skills, experience, qualifications, and job market data
More information about location
Nonprofit online education platform
Open for applications
Nonprofit online education platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$181.7-227.1k
$245,471 - $306,839 CAD. The salary offered will depend on internal pay equity and the candidate’s relevant skills, experience, qualifications, and job market data
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
Khan Academy's mission is to provide a free, world‑class education for anyone, anywhere.
Role
Who you are
- You have 10+ years of relevant experience, with at least 6 years of experience as an individual contributor on an in-house product design team, and at least 4 years of experience as a people manager of product/UX designers
- You have senior expertise in design methods and strategies, with skills across service design, complex software product design, user research, and modern user interface design
- You have a wealth of experience with developing and improving the design process, with a keen sense of where we are struggling and proactively applying your expertise to streamline how our team ships world-class design solutions
- You know how to build strong relationships cross-functionally and bring people into the conversation when their input and buy-in is crucial
- You have the ability to juggle ambiguous and broad problems/opportunities along with smaller well-defined projects
- You are a critical participant in design reviews, modeling what it looks like to deliver effective feedback to strengthen design work, as well as soliciting feedback at every step of the process
- You are comfortable in ambiguous situations and dynamic environments, where you regularly interact with and gather feedback from Senior Leadership
- You are scrappy, have a bias toward action
- You have an understanding of common needs and roles in K-12 school districts in the U.S
- Motivated by the Khan Academy mission “to provide a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere."
- Proven cross-cultural competency skills demonstrating self-awareness, awareness of other, and the ability to adopt inclusive perspectives, attitudes, and behaviors to drive inclusion and belonging throughout the organization
- Introspective, mature, and emotionally intelligent, with excellent communication skills
- Invested in your own growth and the growth of our team
- Proactively seek out the people/information you need to move work forward and unblock yourself
- High comfort level working within a strong product and pedagogical vision
- Able to balance the immediate tactical needs of helping deliver and ship features with scouting ahead for what’s next
- Willing to roll your sleeves up and pitch in when a project goes off-script
- Passionate about education and designing engaging learning experiences, deeply curious about how and why people learn
What the job involves
- In this role, you will act as the Senior Design Manager for a group of designers working on ambitious, high-impact experiences across Khan Academy offerings, including those for students, teachers, and administrators
- As a Senior Design Manager, you’ll be a force multiplier for your reports, applying your senior-level expertise and proven design process as you guide and coach your team across many projects and products
- You will also use your strong process and project management skills to improve how our team collaborates with cross-functional teams
- You will play a vital role on an inclusive, collaborative Design team, helping us shape and fulfill the mission of the organization: to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere
- We genuinely care about people and value compassion in our everyday interactions
- You’ll be able to be yourself, feel valued, supported, learn and grow, no matter how experienced you are
- Even if you don’t check every box (no one does), we encourage you to apply
- Partner with Product Management, Engineering, Content, Data, Design peers, and other departments to shape the future of our products, beginning with Assessments and District platforms
- Lead a 5-10 person design team in owning the end-to-end product research and design solutions – from IA and journey maps to wireframes, user flows, high-fidelity mockups, clickable prototypes, and everything in between
- Seamlessly shift between high-level strategic planning and detailed execution across a complex, multi-touchpoint product surface area, ensuring alignment across all team deliverables
- Know our customers and products inside and out. Inspire others to a similar depth of knowledge - and to use customer/product insights to guide product decisions
- Set the bar for delivering high-impact, high-quality products rooted in a deep understanding of the business and customer needs
- Manage, coach, and develop individual contributors, from associate to principal levels, in both user experience research and product design. Engage in coaching, career planning, career path development, and performance management of this critical team
- Provide and develop a culture of feedback where designers are encouraged to iteratively improve on their work
- Cultivate a growth mindset by contributing to design best practices for organizational needs such as career ladders, design critique, lean research, advanced design methods, integrating our brand into the product, and more
- Drive communication with cross-functional peers, directors, and teammates, ensuring clarity and alignment up, down, and across
Our take
Khan Academy is a non-profit that provides free online education materials, including teacher tools, instruction videos, and practice exercises to support users of all ages. It has over 10 million users a month and covers subjects all the way up to college level.
With nearly a quarter of American adults unable to use mathematics in daily life, Khan Academy’s interactive quizzes, instructional videos, and teacher tools are timely. Khan Academy started life as a series of educational YouTube videos, before building a full-scale platform after receiving an influx of donations from Silicon Valley philanthropists. This background has led it to embrace rather than reject the educational possibilities of new tech such as AI, with the founder regarding traditional institution's banning of tools like ChatGPT as a mistake.
The company offers its tools completely for free, instead relying on donations and volunteers. A key focus is tackling wealth inequality in education. A partnership with the College Board (who produce entrance examinations for higher education) has made access to SAT test prep materials free for millions. 2024 saw a partnership with Microsoft for Khan Academy's Khanmigo product, now free to use for Microsoft customers.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
23% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Jul 2020
$3m
GRANT
Oct 2017
$3m
GRANT
Total funding: $16.2m
Company benefits
- Flexible spending account (FSA)
- Dental insurance
- Optical insurance
- Life insurance
- Performance bonus
- 401K plan
- Family medical leave
- Diversity program
- Pet friendly workplace
- Work from home opportunities
- Health insurance
- Affinity groups where Parents, Black, Hispanic/Latino, Women and Gender Minorities, and LGBTQIA+ identified folks come together
Company HQ
Mountain View, CA
Leadership
Caroline Hu Flexer
(CEO)Holds a BA and MArch in Architecture from Stanford and Harvard University. They also have an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and formerly co-founded Duck Duck Moose, a mobile educational platform for children.
Salman Khan
(Executive Director)They graduated from Harvard Business School and have previously worked in Finance.
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