Staff Product Manager, Design Systems

Role Description

As a Staff Product Manager focused in Design Systems, you’ll play a key role in evolving DIG (Dropbox Interface Guidelines) in service of our internal customers, and delivering cross-product patterns that make Dropbox easy for external customers to learn and use.

Your role will be threefold:

Set direction for the product roadmap for Design Systems.

• Drive roadmap & prioritization (in collaboration with Design and Eng partners)

• Establish, define, and track impact through quant and qual metrics, using data to inform priorities

• Drive experiments to understand impact of and de-risk foundational updates that may affect product metrics

Lead customer focused practices within the Design Systems team, and engage directly with all users of the system to build strong feedback loops.

• Coordinate and perform user and customer research (both internal and external); lead focus groups, and engage internal champions

• Evangelize systems to internal customers, partners, and stakeholders

• Own the product success and adoption of higher order patterns that are built to span across Dropbox products and platforms for consistency and efficiency

Own Design Systems team product operations.

• Drive overall operations and rhythms for product planning and execution

• Manage communication and relationship building with stakeholders

• Manage routine feedback collection (including internal CSAT surveys)

• Build and evolve internal release playbooks

• Coordinate complex product rollouts that require alignment with product teams

• In collaboration with Design Ops team, ensure Design Systems is equipped with necessary tooling and licenses

Responsibilities

Systems Product Strategy & Execution: 

• Work closely with Design and Engineering partners to bring systems strategies to life, delivering high quality UI foundations that enable designers and engineers across the company to efficiently deliver great products.
• Deliver strategic narratives, roadmaps, product plans, documentation, and training.

Collaboration & Communication: 

• Work proactively as a trusted partner with Engineers, Product Designers, Content Designers, Brand Designers, Researchers, Product Managers, Program Managers, and leaders at all levels.
• Through relationships and observations, discover opportunities for strategic design patterns across the company. Hold crucial conversations with leaders and on-the-ground teams to influence systems adoption.
• Bring enthusiasm, expertise, and clarity to all customer interactions as an influential ambassador for Design Systems across the company.
• Craft clear narratives that translate complex, technical subjects into compelling stories that executive leaders can support.

Results & Customer Focus

• Set up systems and rituals to ensure customer input drives action and prioritization within the team
• Manage and surface themes from CSAT, listening tours, champions programs, and other touchpoints
• Take in available metrics and data points to drive clear prioritization; determine ROI when there is a lack of clear data or metrics
• Approach work with a strong operational mindset
• Influence senior leaders and executives to prioritize adopting centrally built UI that drives efficiency and quality

Requirements

• The ideal candidate will have at least 8-10 years of professional experience.
• Ability to manage multiple partner stakeholders, including senior leaders and executives.
• Proven ability to partner effectively with Design and Engineering counterparts to drive success of a team.
• Deep experience with managing and evolving operations.
• Demonstrates customer empathy for both internal and external customer needs and behaviors.
• Skilled in analyzing and utilizing both quantitative and qualitative data to inform decisions.
• Experience building products in a remote or distributed team environment.
• Ability to zoom in and out to deeply understand industry trends and platform ecosystems.
• Experience with accessibility standards.
• Crafts clear narratives that translate complex, technical subjects into compelling stories that executive leaders can support.