Product Design Manager, Mailchimp Design System (Manager 2)

Job Overview

At Mailchimp, world-class design helps power the success of small and mid-sized businesses globally, creating the tools that fuel their growth. Our designers are integral at every step of a project—from gathering insights, brainstorming, prototyping, and experimentation to launching pixel-perfect designs. We push the boundaries of innovation by leveraging machine learning and gen AI, simplifying the complex, and ensuring every interaction is delightfully simple and seamless for our customers.

To help us achieve our goals, we are seeking a Design Manager to lead the team responsible for our Mailchimp Design System. This is an opportunity to steward and evolve how Mailchimp shows up as a part of the Intuit ecosystem and suite of products that together fuel business growth for our customers. We’re hoping to find someone who can cast a bold vision for the future of Mailchimp as part of a connected ecosystem and is excited to push the bar for quality and execution—both on their team, and in partnership with the feature teams they’ll serve. A great design leader for this role will skillfully balance design strategy, thought leadership, and people leadership—but won’t shy away from getting into the weeds and get their hands dirty when necessary.

Responsibilities

• Manage and hire a group of world-class designers of all experience levels
• Deeply understand your customers and their biggest problems and pain points
• Clearly define the design vision for the Mailchimp Design System that elevates both the functional and emotional design of the core product. Paint a clear vision for all stakeholders through your ability to simplify the complex and communicate visually with a compelling story.
• Work across business units and in partnership with the Intuit Design System to deliver systems that create seamless E2E experiences for our customers, no matter where they are in the ecosystem—adopt and contribute to the broader Intuit Design System to further this goal
• Partner with Mailchimp Brand and Marketing leaders to ensure our product experiences deliver on our brand promise across all touchpoints
• Advocate for and enable design system adoption throughout teams, acting as a subject matter expert to other designers and developers implementing our design direction
• Set a high bar for design quality, advocating for clean, elegant and usable design that our customers love. Provide guidance and feedback to designers E2E, enabling others to deliver quality experiences that push the bar at scale, developing champions for best-in-class design.
• Improve collaboration and contributions to the design system from across design teams, unlocking scale and greater impact as you define shared components with speed
• Balance long term considerations with continuously shipping, iterating, and evolving the design system

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Product Design, Human-Computer Interaction, or related field
• 7+ years of industry design experience
• 3+ years of experience managing designers and leading high-impact teams
• Work examples that demonstrate your strong product and interaction design craft, process, and track record leading teams to high-impact results
• Practical design systems experience that shows strong ownership of or significant contribution to an existing design system
• A clear understanding and point of view on how generative and predictive artificial intelligence will change product design, and how design systems can be cohesively applied across web and mobile to support that evolution
• Examples of design and development advocacy that led to breakthrough adoption of design system tools, processes, or artifacts
• Mastery of design tools (we use Figma), agile development methodologies, and accessibility requirements, both in design and code
• An added plus: substantial experience working on complex products that support technical workflows, such as editing tools, advanced marketing tools, or apps for creators.
• You’ll thrive in this role if you have a highly collaborative team spirit and are able to take in multiple points of view while synthesizing and communicating clear outcomes and decisions for stakeholders across the organization. With your expertise in design craft, you can align stakeholders quickly through your ability to thoughtfully articulate design rationale—and why it matters to our customers. We’re looking for confidence in leading teams through ambiguity, and a track record of creative problem solving while balancing competing needs—customer needs, technology constraints, and business goals— to deliver impactful results for both your customers and business.
• If you’re excited about this opportunity but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with the qualifications outlined in the description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.