Senior Product Design Manager, CX Platform

Product Design at Gusto is made up of over 60 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We’re a cross-functional bunch focused on Design, Research, Writing, Ops and Front-end Development who are always looking for opportunities to build understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto. We don’t care a whole lot about swim lanes and we work closely with our partners in Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to design, build and ship experiences that make a difference. We are passionate advocates for thoughtful, crafted, and inclusive experiences and we believe great design can make hard things possible, even delightful. Read more about Design at Gusto.

About the team

The CX Platform team is a horizontal team dedicated to crafting dynamic and personalized customer self-service capabilities within our products by leveraging AI, chat, help documentation, tutorials, and demos. When a customer needs to contact Support, this team is responsible for designing a seamless end-to-end experience, from initial contact to issue resolution. Providing a seamless end-to-end Customer Support experience extends beyond our product. It encompasses the ability to enable cohesive and intuitive experiences for the tools that Support relies on to accurately and effectively serve our customers.

About the opportunity

As the Senior Product Design Manager for the CX Platform team, you’ll lead a small team of two (2) product designers to craft high quality and intuitive platform and service experiences for the range of customers we serve. This role is for someone who wants to lean into their strategic and leadership acumen, but is obsessed with building themselves. You’ll leverage service design expertise to craft cohesive end-to-end service experiences for our customers, and will be responsible for taking a platform approach to crafting highly effective self-serve product and tooling experiences. You’ll work closely with the various product teams who will leverage the experiences you create: our Experience Platform and Design Systems teams, Customer Support, Biztech, and documentation writers. You’ll be accountable for driving the vision for how we leverage cutting-edge technology such as AI, and ultimately, the vision for an optimal customer service experience.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Craft the end-to-end journeys and develop frameworks, patterns and principles that will be used to help our teams deliver world-class service experiences.
• Empower a small team of product designers, creating the conditions for them to do work they’re proud of and that serves the needs of our customers.
• Work with cross-functional partners in Product Management, Engineering, Data Science, Design, and Customer Support to understand customer problems and identify key opportunities for the customer and our business.
• Ensure that proposed solutions are customer-informed through research, data, and insights from our Customer Support team.
• Balance an iterative approach and urgency to solve customer pain with ensuring that short term improvements ladder up to long-term vision and meet a high bar for the customer experience.
• Hold high standards for the customer experience, including partnering with engineering partners to refine the end customer experience and ensure that what we release is bug free, performant, accessible, and responsive.
• Design and advocate for cohesive experiences through the use of Workbench, our Design System, and net-new platform capabilities.
• Speak clearly to tradeoffs and the “Why” behind design decisions in terms non-designers can understand and participate in.
• Collaborate with designers and design leaders on other teams to develop cohesive solutions for shared problems.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 12+ years' Product Design experience, ideally with four of those in management, and with experience working on complex products with heavy service component in a horizontal capacity.
• Your ability to showcase a service design and platform approach to your work.
• A deep understanding of design systems and how you’ve leveraged and contributed to them.
• Direct experience designing for AI, or a solid understanding of the capabilities.
• A track record of up-leveling direct reports and raising the bar for design quality within an organization.
• A master at customer journey mapping and information architecture.
• A proven track record of designing great UX for complex workflows and crafting end-to-end experience visions and frameworks, while showcasing an iterative approach toward execution.
• Demonstration of a high quality bar, maintaining design quality and accessibility across screen sizes.
• Strong opinions loosely held and a willingness to engage in constructive debates about scope and tradeoffs to build alignment and progress work. You’ve built great relationships with cross functional collaborators and know how to model this for the team.
• Communication and collaboration skills that enable you to explain the impact of your work, tradeoffs you’ve made, lessons learned, and design rationale, and generate alignment and enthusiasm across the company.
• Ability to embrace ambiguous situations as opportunities to add clarity.
• Passion for Gusto’s mission and the impact we can have on the world.

At Gusto, we strive to provide rewards that empower employees to achieve their financial and personal goals. We offer competitive compensation packages with a strong emphasis on equity based compensation (ownership in Gusto). Our cash compensation range for this role is $194,000/yr to $232,000/yr in Denver most remote locations, and $211,000/yr to $251,000/yr in San Francisco New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.