Manager, Product Design
The Manager of Product Design role
STRATEGY | CRAFT | LEADERSHIP
The Manager of Product Design role will be an inspirational leader to our high-performing team of Product Designers at ACG. This person will impact our strategic design thinking at A Cloud Guru, which will have broad reaching impacts across our Product, Engineering and Product Marketing teams and the company as a whole. In this role you will have the opportunity to identify strategic design initiatives to help drive the value in the role of Product Design within ACG, whilst balancing the quality of design craft and experience felt by our customers.
Hello, we're A Cloud Guru
Our friends call us ACG.
A Cloud Guru was built by engineers for everyone, everywhere. Here, you’ll have the freedom to follow your curiosity. We’re not afraid to just try, because when you’re working with cutting edge technologies, experimentation and trying out new ideas have to be encouraged and celebrated. Our engineers are building the world’s largest (and most awesome) cloud learning platform. Why? Our mission is to teach the world to cloud. Our fun, practical courses have helped over 1.5 million people learn to cloud, and we’re just getting started.
We’re not a training company that just decided to sell training courses. We grew up out of the cloud ecosystem. We were a bunch of cloud engineers who pulled people together to create a training platform. That’s why we’re genuinely passionate about what we create. And we are known for practicing what we preach.
What makes the Product & Technology team awesome...
Learning to cloud means unlocking a world of possibilities for our students. Using the latest tech, we design the tools to teach people cloud faster and better. The team is talented (and a little quirky), and we’re all in it together.
- Cutting-edge tech We’ve built a cloud-first Serverless Architecture with tools like Lambda, API Gateway, GraphQL, ReactJS,
- Founded by engineers Having a CEO who’s also an engineer is nice — he knows the effort it takes to make things awesome.
- We don’t bite We’re friendly, down-to-earth, and collaborative. There are no high-performing jerks and no heroes. Just great teams.
- Hungry and humble We’re dedicated to learning all the things to create the best product possible.
You'll do well at ACG if you're open to learning and trying new things, and you like to be surrounded by other friendly, passionate and driven people. –Natasja, Makeup Guru (and Software Developer)
As a Manager of Product Design at ACG, you’ll get to:
- Lead and Manage People
- Lead and scale a team of product designers of various levels and skill sets
- Foster a culture of collaboration both within the distributed design team, but also within the cross functional product teams between design, product management and engineering
- Foster a culture of collaboration between the product design team and the creative/brand team to create a more holistic experience for our customers
- Drive Design Strategy
- Lead the product teams in the US in becoming design led and user research focused
- Identify and drive forward strategic design initiatives within the company that have a direct and measurable impact on company or team performance
- Cultivate Strong Design Practice & Process
- Own and be responsible for the quality of design process and craft
- Collaborate with the product management and engineering leaders to drive excellence in craft and practice
- Help develop the practice of customer centric Discovery as part of the product delivery process
- Hold a high standard of Design Execution
- Be accountable for design execution and output all the way through from ideation to the customer experience
- Understand the relationship between brand and product, and ensure that our brand lives and breathes in everything the teams produce
- Develop and incorporate systems and tools that help the teams execute with less friction and higher consistency
- Bring an element of fun into everything the team produces
What you bring to the table
We focus on hiring values aligned people, because we believe the right person can learn all the things to be successful in their role. Self-confidence plays a big part in what you apply for. We encourage all job applicants to apply even if they are nervous to do so. College degrees aren't required for any roles, and career gaps or switches are totally welcome.
- 3+ years experience in a Design Leadership role, responsible for managing both junior and senior individual contributors
- A love for solving tough customer problems by combining thoughtful research, clever technology and beautiful design, and experience helping design teams do the same
- Relevant practical Product Design experience working on software products and experiences that are customer insight and data driven
- Experience working with or on product design teams across both UI and UX design capabilities, where a high standard of design practice and execution is evident
- A sense of fun and creativity, and the ability to instill this in your team’s culture and design work
- Bonus points if you bring a strong technical understanding of modern UI technologies, design patterns and conventions
- Bonus points if you’ve worked closely with remote or distributed design and product teams within a scaling technology company
We want the people who care about doing a good job. The ones who have the humility and hunger to learn. - Sam Kroonenburg, Co-Founder and CEO
More than a job
Where you work isn’t just a career decision -- it’s a life decision. We get it. That’s why we want all of our Gurus to feel a sense of belonging that comes from feeling supported in all areas of their lives. Everyone has family, friends and interests outside of their careers, so we offer perks and benefits to make work, work better for you.
- 4 weeks PTO, plus 10 sick days, and holidays. Because even when your office is your living room, we all need time to unplug.
- Remotely awesome. Get $500 to level up your home office, monthly snack boxes, free Headspace access, weekly lunch funds, and $50 monthly for internet.
- Human connection. Get to know the Gurus with good times and get-togethers inspired by our values, virtual happy hours, lunchtime trivia, or a socially distanced drive-in movie.
- Gender-neutral paid parental leave. Expanding your family? We offer 12 weeks of gender-neutral paid parental leave, and reimburse up to $10,000 for eligible adoption expenses.
- $1,000 continuing education budget. All Gurus get $250 a quarter to spend on personal development, and 2 hours each week reserved for learning something new.
Remote where?
The A Cloud Guru team has grown a lot since it was just two brothers with a dream of teaching the world to cloud! We now employ gurus in 30 states of the USA as well as in Australia and the UK. For the time being that’s as far as we can go. We won’t bore you with the details, but setting up the extra operations we would need to employ people in new states or countries is a little bit more expensive than replicating your database in another AZ, if you know what we mean. So as much as we would love to have staff in as many countries as we have students, we are only opening this role to applicants in areas we currently have operations.
If you’re not sure if your US state is included, please still apply! We will let you know if you are in a state that we currently don’t have operations. If anything changes we will reach back out.
What’s the interview process like at ACG?
Applying for a job can feel intimidating and like a full-time job of its own. You shouldn’t have to burn through a week of sick time or all your best out-of-office excuses just to put feelers out for a new career opportunity. We want to be as transparent about the process as possible to help ease your mind. It’s our goal to provide you a fair, efficient interviewing experience that respects you and your time — and to do it all with a sidecar of delight.
Once you submit an application, we’ll review it. If you’re a good fit, you’ll have an initial chat with a recruiter over the phone. A phone interview with a manager typically follows. Depending on your role, you might then be asked to do a little homework (but nothing too time consuming). Then we’ll schedule a Zoom call to meet other members of the team, answer any questions you have, and give you a feel for what it’s really like to work at ACG. If you're on the fence, just give it a try.
Keep being awesome, Cloud Gurus.