Principal Design Program Manager

Your Impact and Responsibilities

• This role requires someone who is a relationship builder and an operational thinker; someone who is fluent in the best practices of user experience and design delivery, and who wants to empower the Experience Design team to partner with our product teams in a sustainable and healthy way. 

• You will operationalize how our design and real search team works together, and create rituals and cadences that foster team connection, a shared purpose, and a collaborative UX community.

• You’ll create new processes and frameworks that help Experience teams define, prioritize, and review its work, and then bring this work forward for consumption by Salesforce’s other UX teams. 

• You will connect the dots between our product teams’ roadmaps and UX’s priorities and deliverables, helping both groups manage design dependencies and deliver successfully. 

• You’ll liaise with design leadership and build strong partnerships with cross-functional stakeholders.

• You will be the point-of-contact for a complex network of business units and functions, and own regular communications up, down, and out to assure alignment and clarity of goals. 

• You’ll be the strategic nerve center of the product UX’s leadership team, coordinating reviews, leading team events, and coordinating presentation material for partner audiences.

Minimum Qualifications

• At least 7 years experience working in enterprise software in any combination of Design, DesignOps, or PgM roles.

• Outstanding partnership, interpersonal, and relationship-building skills. The ability to collaborate well in a cross-functional, matrix’d management environment, and work across multiple departments and business units.

• Proven experience partnering directly with product management and engineering teams, with an understanding of their priorities, constraints, and how UX informs their work streams.

• Thorough familiarity with how design gets done. Understand what happens when and why, what natural dependencies exist, how to mitigate risks, and when it’s OK to be visionary (and when it’s not).

• Superb communication skills that shine in-person and across multiple mediums. The talent to tell a story, advocate for a project or program, and facilitate understanding to different audiences at whichever level is appropriate.

• Strong understanding of what it takes to ship software at scale. Experience running projects using agile and/or scrum processes, and understand development team make-ups (i.e., roles, responsibilities, and how they interact).

• Ability to learn and master internal project management tools to ensure design work is properly represented and tracked, and contribute new tools and processes to make work more visible to the entire organization.

• BS in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Preferred Qualifications

• Ability to establish credibility and rapport with senior executives, and technical and non-technical team members.

• An internal compass that points towards ethics and equality, and the conviction to speak up if we stray off-course.

• Demonstrated ability to influence peers and managers, and build consensus while dealing with ambiguity.

• Experience running events and programs for internal teams, external customers, or both at the same time!

• Experience designing and thinking in systems, not just single-purpose apps.

• Experience designing for visual page builders, mobile apps, content management systems, app development tools.

• Project Management Professional (PMP) certification.