Remote Product Design Manager at Close
🌎Location:USA Only. Full-Time
Available Time Zones:
EST (UTC -5),
CST (UTC -6),
MST (UTC -7),
PST (UTC -8),
AKST (UTC -9),
HST (UTC -10)
🌏 Why Join Close?
💚 Our Core Values
💻 Collaboration Approach
APPLY NOW
Who We Are
Close operates as a lean, profitable, fully remote team of around 100 dedicated individuals who prioritize independence and tangible results. Our mission is to enhance sales efficiency for emerging businesses with our thoughtfully integrated CRM that focuses on communication.
Our Product team is committed to providing exceptional software as a service for over 6,000 businesses that trust Close to facilitate their growth. We prioritize data analysis, understand the root causes of challenges, emphasize practical use cases, and engage with our customers frequently. You can learn more about us on The Making of Close, our internal Product & Engineering blog.
We are in search of an experienced Product Design Manager to lead and mentor our expanding design team. In this position, you will be responsible for the design of our web, desktop, and mobile applications, and take a vital role in creating innovative functions. Reporting directly to our Senior Director of Product, this role is crucial to our team.
This position suits someone who enjoys a hands-on leadership style, thrives on managing a lively team, and has a passion for addressing complex problems with simple, elegant solutions.
Lead with Intention: You will have the chance to guide and develop a group of skilled designers, fostering a culture of creativity and excellence. Your leadership will significantly shape our design vision and product evolution.
Scale Impact: You will oversee design efforts that deliver meaningful and substantial benefits to our customers and their teams daily. Your contributions will be essential in creating a premier CRM solution.
Focused Development: Our approach to product development is shaped by Shape Up. We operate in six-week cycles, thoughtfully addressing the right issues and delivering impactful products on schedule. Collaboration between Product, Design, and Engineering ensures we find effective solutions. We prioritize sustainable progress and long-term success.
Design-Led Initiatives: You’ll lead projects where design is the primary driver, establishing benchmarks for innovative outcomes that arise from a design-focused methodology.
Role Overview
Team Leadership
- Manage a remote team of over 5 designers (largely Senior-level)
- Facilitate 1:1s and team gatherings, providing continuous performance evaluations
- Create and implement quarterly objectives for the team
- Foster a strong team culture, continuously elevating design excellence
- Identify opportunities for team member growth
- Scale the team as necessary
- Enhance and refine team workflows
Research Responsibilities
- Lead user research initiatives to identify pain points, opportunities, and insights
- Encourage a culture of regular qualitative and quantitative research within the design team (e.g., user interviews, surveys, usability testing)
- Ensure user research insights are incorporated into design choices
Design Oversight
- Provide regular design critiques (written feedback, video sessions)
- Supervise design planning and task assignments for each Cycle
- Shape project ideas, particularly in the early stages
- Collaborate closely with Product Management and Engineering throughout the process
- Partner with Engineering on organizing and expanding our design system
- Maintain brand consistency for Close
- Engage in limited individual contributor tasks
Strategic Vision
- Articulate and share a compelling design vision that aligns with the product strategy and Close brand identity
- Contribute to planning for the long-term roadmap
- Identify, advocate for, and implement “design-driven” initiatives (e.g., redesigns)
About You
Qualifications & Location
- 8+ years of product design experience (minimum 4 years in a management role)
- Expertise in all design facets: user research, interaction design, visual design, etc.
- Experience in establishing and refining workflow processes for design teams
- Proven history of collaborating effectively with Product and Engineering teams on successful endeavors
- Experience in building and maintaining design systems
- Availability to work approximately East Coast hours (predominantly, the product, engineering, and design departments are based in the US East Coast or Europe)
Design & UX Acumen
- Strong portfolio demonstrating elegant, straightforward solutions for intricate desktop/mobile SaaS products
- Solid grasp of information hierarchy, progressive disclosure, typography, spacing, color theory, etc.
- Extensive knowledge of contemporary UX/UI patterns for both desktop and mobile
- Exceptional eye for software design quality
Skills & Expertise
- Dedicated to helping product designers flourish and excel in their positions
- Comfortable leading a remote team with significant autonomy
- Customer-focused and solutions-oriented
- Robust interpersonal abilities, particularly in communication and teamwork
- Advocate for design, while adept at managing limitations and making necessary trade-offs (believe in fixed timelines with adjustable scopes)
- Well-versed in CSS, accessibility standards, etc.
- Proficient in Figma (familiar with using components, variants, variables, etc.)
Bonus Qualifications
- Familiarity with Shape Up
- Experience in sales or with sales-related tools
- Background in the B2B industry
- Experience with GitHub Issues & Projects
🌏 Why Join Close?
- Watch our latest culture video that showcases our annual team retreat in Italy
- Fully remote company
- 5 weeks of PTO plus a Winter Holiday Break with 2 additional PTO days for each year of service
- Option to work 5 days per week (standard full-time) or 4 days per week at 80% pay
- 1 month of paid sabbatical after every 5 years of employment
- Paid parental leave available
- Medical, Dental, Vision with Health Savings Account option (for US employees)
- 401k matching at 6% (for US employees)
- Dependent care Flexible Spending Account (for US employees)
- Learn more about our journey and team 🚀
💚 Our Core Values
- Build a place you want to stay - Focus on long-term thoughts and strategies
- No BS - Uphold transparency and honesty, especially in challenging moments
- Invest in one another - Cultivate successful relationships with coworkers and clients
- Discipline leads to freedom - Honor commitments to yourself and others
- Aim for excellence - Consistently push yourself and others to improve
💻 Collaboration Approach
- Productivity, Quality & Impact - We avoid hour tracking. We believe you understand best how to prioritize tasks, meet your objectives, and contribute effectively.
- Asynchronous collaboration - With team members worldwide, we don’t expect nontraditional working hours, leading us to prefer asynchronous communication. Most teams conduct 2-5 hours of internal meetings weekly.
- Valuing Deep Work - Prioritize uninterrupted work time during your regular hours, rather than post-meeting.
- Autonomy & Freedom - Establish a work environment that suits your needs. We trust our team members with a high degree of responsibility from the beginning.