Manager, Product Design - Engagement

The Engagement organization at Discord is focused on deepening user engagement and retention—ensuring that as we bring in new users, they stick around and make Discord an irreplaceable part of their daily lives. We work on Discord's core social systems: voice and messaging. Our mission is to drive repeatable mechanisms that increase engagement across both our core desktop gaming audience and emerging segments like mobile gamers.

We're looking for an experienced Product Design Manager to lead a team of designers working on one of these strategic themes. You'll manage designers tackling challenges like making voice calls more discoverable and engaging, creating social feedback loops that keep conversations going, or ensuring Discord's foundational experiences remain world-class.

As a Design Manager, you'll independently lead your team across a single domain, balancing strategic thinking with hands-on craft leadership. You'll work closely with cross-functional partners in Product and Engineering to translate Engagement's strategy into delightful user experiences, while developing your designers and maintaining Discord's high quality bar.

What You'll Be Doing

• Develop a team of highly-engaged designers by coaching and instilling a sense of ownership and impact.
• Provide direction and guidance of product designers' output, promote partnerships and design process.
• Build close bonds with your corresponding engineering and product management leaders to influence product strategy and ensure world-class product execution.
• Partner with Staff+ designers and XFN partners to define and refine the design portions of the roadmap, ensuring work is appropriately broken down and prioritized.
• Set a strong pace for the team and foster a culture of quality by balancing holistic thinking with feature impact, cutting scope when needed without compromising quality.
• Make sound first-principle decisions around resourcing and team composition, adapting to changing needs or tuning team dynamics.
• Drive design excellence within your team and owned systems; mentor designers on user-centric thinking and risk mitigation.
• Occasionally be hands-on with design work, pitching in to support your team and keep them focused on deeper work—however this is primarily a management role.

What you should have

• 2+ years of experience as a Design Manager and/or have led at least 2 Product Designers previously within a design team.
• 6+ years experience in multi-platform digital products as a Product Designer (or similar role). Especially fluent with mobile product development and consumer products, with experience using prototyping tools to demonstrate product concepts.
• A portfolio of work you've designed and shipped as well as examples of work you directed delivered by your team. Examples of how you have previously influenced your product teams, organizations or discipline.
• An enjoyment of people leadership. This includes recruiting, training and developing, organization design, and leading by example.
• Strong eye for craft. You can identify when work can benefit from more time or investment, identifying gaps in visual or interaction design.
• History of strong partnerships with engineering and product management leadership.
• You thrive in ambiguous environments and get excited about figuring out strategies or processes to address them—both in product and internal team structures.
• You are a first principles thinker that can work with others to come up with pragmatic solutions.
• Designing yourself does not scare you, and you're happy to jump in to help if needed. You are still a designer even if you don't do it all the time.