Senior Manager, Product Design (f/m/d)

Overview

Senior Manager, Product Design leads a design team across content performance optimization, application platform capabilities, business foundations, and design systems. You partner with product and engineering leadership to shape strategy and craft, influencing a cohesive, scalable platform. You’ll coach designers, raise craft standards, and embed design as a strategic voice in multi-team initiatives, including AI-native design. This role sits at a pivotal moment post-acquisition by Salesforce, offering impact at scale in a headless, API-first context.

Responsibilities

• Lead and manage designers across three product areas: optimization, application foundations, and business foundations, plus design systems.
• Partner with product and engineering leadership on strategy and roadmap, shaping the evolution of the platform.
• Define and advance AI-native design leadership and practices within Contentful’s design tooling and workflows.
• Coach career growth, set expectations for design craft, and empower ownership over platform components.
• Influence coherent vision across multi-team areas to support a unified platform.
• Contribute to the design system initiative at scale (Forma 36) and related information architecture and tooling.
• Support distributed, global teams and collaborate with stakeholders across Europe and the US.

Key requirements

• 8+ years of product design experience.
• 3+ years of direct people management of product designers.
• Experience in B2B SaaS or platform environments.
• Strong partner to product and engineering leadership at strategy level.
• Customer-centric design approach grounded in user insights.
• Proven track record shaping design function practices beyond a single team.
• High design craft with evidence across interaction and visual design.
• Experience leading design for complex, multi-team product areas; coherent platform vision.
• Experience contributing to or owning a design system at scale (e.g., Forma 36).
• Experience managing distributed, global teams.
• Interest in AI-native product design and evolving design tooling/workflows.
• Portfolio demonstrating coaching and career development.
• Comfort with enterprise/platform, API-first, systems-thinking context.

• collaboration across functions
• coaching and people development
• strategic influence and persuasion
• design systems (Forma 36)
• interaction design
• visual design

…