Product Design Manager, Design Foundations

Job Description

About this Role

The Core XD team at Netflix is searching for a proven senior leader to oversee and lead our Design Foundations team, which brings together Design Systems, Accessibility, Data Viz, and Design Strategy + Architecture as a cohesive unit. You should be passionate about delivering quality at scale, and able to bring organizational vision, structure, and leadership to help teams succeed.

About the Team

Core XD is a horizontal team whose mission is to enable quality and innovation at scale for the design org. We have five sub teams, each focused on a different aspect of this mission. We are accelerators and partners, with collaboration and the success of product teams at the heart of what we do.

Although Netflix is an established company, in many ways we leverage the best of startups. The organization is flat, individual responsibility is big, and there is an emphasis on keeping non-productive influences out of the everyday decision process. We endeavor to stay nimble and make decisions quickly.

About You

You are an empathetic, partnership-oriented leader that has successfully recruited, inspired, and guided teams to deliver effective, collaboratively built, scalable design solutions. You have a business and systems-driven mindset, disciplined in approach with a collection of best practices born from real-world success, but able to imagine and create new paradigms that don't exist. You embrace ambiguity and details matter.

You measure success in terms of both human and business impact. As a leader, you have fostered excellence through collaboration and encouraged an inclusive and open environment that makes space for culturally diverse viewpoints and working styles. You are an excellent advocate, evangelist, and listener.

You seek and offer candid and constructive feedback, and lean into conflict with curiosity, humility, and a willingness to understand. You are biased to action, proactive and results-oriented. You strive to simplify complex problems and understand that the question is sometimes more important than the solution.

What you will do
• Lead and manage a multidisciplinary team focused on enabling Netflix to deliver quality at scale, providing vision, direction, and guidance as needed
• Drive deeper understanding and collaboration across the design org, working with multiple product teams and platforms (mobile, web, TV)
• Collaborate with XD leaders to plan and develop effective engagements, prioritizing resources and workstreams against business needs
• Inspire, coach, and guide a team of talented designers to continually hone their craft, develop new capabilities, and deliver solutions that enable coherence and innovation
• Provide vision, clarity, and focus, proactively identifying and unblocking barriers
• Inspire a healthy inclusive team culture that is globally oriented

The Must-Haves
• Experience influencing and successfully collaborating with product design, product management, engineering, and brand
• Experience leading and helping grow managers – this team will scale, so a passion for developing leaders and orgs is important
• Leading and scaling an effective, collaborative design systems team (bonus: having done this for both consumer as well as enterprise)
• Experience establishing, championing, and helping lead Accessibility with cross functional partners, particularly Engineering and PM
• Experience with data visualization to present data-driven insights and information
• Creating and maintaining alignment across a broad, fast-moving organization with multiple stakeholders and competing priorities
• Successfully navigating and inspiring cultural change across an organization
• Mentoring and growing senior designers and contributing to the design community
• Fostering a high degree of accountability and trust within your team and those you partner with
• A willingness to fail and learn
• A passion for entertainment, filmmaking, and storytelling

Even Better
• Strong technical as well as user experience aptitude
• Experience managing global and diverse teams

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-d5z6q0-3-143-218-146-42 in your application.