Design Manager

Overview

Hi there!

We’re looking for a Design Manager to manage and grow our blossoming design team at Zapier. Are you excited to foster a user-centered design culture in 100% remote company? Then keep reading!

We know applying for and taking on a new a job at any company requires a leap of faith. We want you to feel comfortable and excited to apply at Zapier. To help share a bit more about life at Zapier here are a few resources in addition to the job description that can give you an inside look at what life is like at Zapier. Hopefully you’ll take the leap of faith and apply.

• Our Commitment to Applicants
• Zapier Guide to Remote Work
• Zapier Code of Conduct
• Working on Diversity and Inclusivity

About You

You put your teammate’s and customer’s needs first. You enjoy helping and enabling designers do great work. You optimize your design strategy for what helps users best achieve their goals. You use data and user research to make human-centered design decisions. You challenge assumptions about what makes a design successful through encouraging divergent exploration and talking to users.

You wear many hats. You are constantly learning to up your people management skills. You have the relevant design skills to build rapport with the design team. On a regular basis you can expect to be holding one on ones with designers, running a weekly design meeting, thinking through tricky design problems, reviewing design iterations, and helping prioritize current design needs across the company.

You have experience hiring and managing designers. This isn’t your first rodeo. You may not have hired or managed hundreds of people before, but you have hired, trained and managed a designer(s) before.

You love collaboration and feedback. You understand successful design doesn’t happen in a vacuum or in secret. You believe in sharing work early, openly, and often. You enjoy teaming up with product managers, engineers, data scientists, customer champions, writers, and customers to help make the design team’s work as effective as possible.

You know how design impacts development. You’ve built functional web apps before. You understand the technical complexities a design might introduce, and can work through them with your teammates. You don’t believe in “tossing designs over the wall,” and would dread doing so.

You can juggle multiple projects. We’re a small team, and there’s no shortage of things you could be doing in a day. But you’re a pro at prioritizing your and your team’s work and you understand how each priority fits in with business goals. You’re comfortable communicating with your team, and you work hard to teardown roadblocks for your team.

You’re resourceful. You know how to work across functions to get the help the design team needs to execute on projects. You work diligently to ensure progress is made across active projects.

Things You Might Do

Zapier is a startup, so you’ll get experience with a little bit of everything. That said, here are some things you’ll do:

• Hold weekly one on ones with members of the design team (today that’s 3 product designers and 1 UX designer)
• Hold weekly design meeting to help the design team execute on current design priorities
• Build rapport with each member of the design team and work hard to help them level up their skills
• Collaborate across functions to help set roadmaps that will achieve business goals through design
• Advocate for and teach design skills across the organization. Find ways to involve non-designers in the design process through design sprints and other creative means.
• Champion our Zapier design standards and style guide
• Provide feedback on design solutions through wireframes, mockups, and interactive prototypes
• Participate in user research and other experiments to inform design decisions
• Give, seek, and receive thoughtful critical feedback
• Give back to the community via open source, blog posts, and sharing design team work
• Actively recruit, onboard and train new designers at Zapier
• Help customers via support to ensure they have the best experience possible

The Whole Package

Location: Planet Earth

If you want to work remote, that’s great. If you want to work near others, that’s cool too. Our team is distributed across the world because it lets us work with the best people. The Product Design Team currently has team members in Illinois, British Columbia, Hawaii, New York and Oregon. You don’t have to be located in the USA, you just have to be talented!

Compensation:

• Competitive salary (we don’t use remote as an excuse to pay less)
• Great healthcare + dental + vision coverage
• Retirement plan with 4% company match
• Profit sharing
• 2 annual company retreats to awesome places
• 14 weeks paid leave for new parents

Pick your own equipment. We’ll set you up with whatever laptop + monitor combo you want plus any software you need.

Unlimited vacation policy (plus we insist you take at least 2 weeks off each year – this isn’t a vague policy where unlimited vacation means no vacation). Work-life balance is really important to everyone at Zapier – we believe it and practice it!

Work with awesome companies around the world. We partner with great software companies all over the world and you’ll get to interact with people from these great companies.

How to Apply

Applying is simple.

1. Please complete this form.
2. Optional: Share anonymously some demographic information about yourselfto help us better track trends related to the backgrounds of candidates interested in working at Zapier in order for us to build a team that represents the users at Zapier and the broader world population.

Finally, wait for us to reply. We reply to everyone, even if we don’t seem like a good fit.