Product Design Manager

We're looking for a Product Design Manager to lead a small, high-impact team and own design direction across some of Workato's most technically sophisticated product areas like API management and data orchestration.

This is a player-coach role. You'll manage a small team of designers while staying personally hands-on with design work. You're not here to delegate and review; you're here to raise the ceiling of what the team produces, shape the design direction for your area, and be the design voice in the room when it matters most.

You'll work closely with product, engineering, and executive stakeholders to define not just how things look and work, but what we should be building and why. You'll defend design decisions with data, rationale, and conviction—pushing back when necessary and adapting when it's right to. Your team will look to you for feedback, growth, and clarity in ambiguity.

This is a role for someone who leads without losing the craft. You're energized by both the people side and the problem-solving side, and you understand that the best design managers are still great designers.

In this role, you will also be responsible to:

• Design leadership

  • Own end-to-end design direction for your product areas—from early vision and strategy through delivery and iteration.

  • Stay hands-on with design work: take on complex problems directly, set the quality bar, and model the standard for your team.

  • Design for technically deep domains—API management, data orchestration, MCP—where your job is to make powerful, infrastructure-level capabilities feel coherent and usable to sophisticated enterprise users.

  • Drive design reviews and critiques that sharpen the work, build team craft, and establish shared standards. You're the person who catches when spacing is off, copy doesn't sound like us, or a pattern drifts outside the design system—and you name it clearly.

  • Incorporate AI-assisted capabilities thoughtfully into products, helping users leverage automation intelligence where it adds genuine value.

• People management

  • Manage, mentor, and grow your team with clear expectations, regular feedback, and genuine investment in their development.

  • Pair the right designer with the right project, and jump in where your seniority and perspective add the most leverage.

  • Build a team culture that is rigorous, low-ego, and committed to doing great work.

• Stakeholder and cross-functional partnership

  • Partner with product managers and engineering leaders to shape roadmaps and define what gets built—not just design what's already been decided.

  • Represent design in executive reviews, product strategy discussions, and cross-functional planning. Communicate design decisions clearly and persuasively to non-design audiences.

  • Advocate for users and design quality when priorities compete. Know how to pick your battles and how to win them.

  • Work with researchers to frame the right questions, bring user insight into the design process, and validate decisions with appropriate rigor.

• 7+ years of product design experience, with at least 2 years in a formal or informal leadership capacity - managing designers, leading design direction across a team, or owning a major product area end-to-end.

• A portfolio that demonstrates ownership of complex, end-to-end design problems. Bonus points for work in enterprise SaaS, developer tools, workflow automation, or other technically complex domains.

• Deep technical fluency. You're comfortable working on features involving concepts like data transformations, API configurations, schema mapping, and automation logic. You can go deep with engineers on implementation tradeoffs.

• Proven ability to lead and grow designers. You've given substantive feedback, had hard conversations, and helped people level up.

• Proficiency in Figma and a strong command of design systems—knowing when to extend them and when to hold the line.

• Experience working at pace in a fast-moving environment. You manage ambiguity without freezing, delegate without abdicating, and stay hands-on without micromanaging.

• Strong stakeholder management skills. You can navigate competing priorities, bring partners along, and defend design decisions with clarity and confidence.

• Exceptional interaction design instincts. You think in systems, flows, states, and edge cases, and you hold a high bar for craft and usability.

The expected salary range for this role is $160,000–$200,000. Actual compensation will be determined based on experience, skills, and other job-related factors.

(REQ ID: 2764)