Senior Manager, Product Design, Growth

Overview

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology (DE&ET) is changing entertainment by bringing the beloved characters, timeless stories, legendary athletes, and epic sporting and live events of Disney directly to a global audience. Our mission is to create the world’s best entertainment experience and to continually push the envelope of what’s possible. The Design team plays a pivotal role in how we develop the best way to communicate our stories and build the best direct-to-consumer products available.
 

As Senior Design Manager for Growth, you will guide and mentor a team focused on crafting intuitive and elegant human-centric experiences across Growth and Commerce user journeys within our product portfolio of media and entertainment products used by millions of Disney customers around the world each year. You will lead the team through the end-to-end development process, working closely with our Product, Engineering, Business and Marketing teams to continuously improve and innovate our consumer facing applications across all device categories.

We are looking for candidates that want to work with a groundbreaking, award-
winning design team. Join us and you’ll be part of a growing team taking acquisition, activation and business growth at Disney Entertainment & ESPN to the next level.

Responsibilities

• Manage a team of designers to deliver world class experiences for our direct-to-consumer products

• Inspire exceptional design thinking within your team, guiding and mentoring designers to deliver high impact solutions and ensuring continual career growth opportunities

• Care deeply about building exceptional, innovative experiences informed by data and user research to help your team create the best-in-class products

• Collaborate with cross-functional partners in Product and Engineering to steer a unified Commerce & Growth roadmap

• Represent the team, and its design strategies, to stakeholders across the organization, including experience engaging with executive leadership

• Drive new ideas through user research, stakeholder reviews and prototypes all the way into our applications

• Guide the team in the development of user research strategies, execution of research and research analysis, and application of research insights to drive the product strategy and design definition

• Continuously strive to optimize our process from design discovery to delivery into engineering

• Recruit and develop a multi-disciplinary and highly functional team to achieve the program goals

• Mentor professional development of the team, including managers and practitioners at all levels

• Create an atmosphere of trust, empathy and a growth mindset to foster psychological safety, connection and collaboration

• Lead and manage team members in different locations & time-zones

Qualifications

• Minimum 10 years of design experience building consumer product

• Minimum 3 years managing and developing diverse design teams

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience

• Strong portfolio demonstrating both personal and team-based high-impact work

• Experience leading and managing a team of multi-faceted designers through multiple full product development cycles

• Proven expertise in design strategy and insights-driven design process

• Strong communication and collaboration with cross-functional partners across Product and Engineering as well as within the broader Design organization

• A fearless, action-oriented mindset, with the humility, drive and tenacity to continually advocate for building intuitive experiences our users value, trust and love

• Proven experience impacting and influencing inside and outside your immediate team

• Clear and polished presentation style, integrating storytelling into your communication to build empathy and get buy-in

• Executive presence, inspiring confidence from your team and peers

• A deep, analytical mindset, applying a data-informed approach from near-term, Horizon 1 initiatives up to long-term, Horizon 3 strategies

• Expert in user-centered design thinking methodologies, as well as the craft of designing intuitive and elegant digital experiences, from outstanding visual design sensibilities to UX and UI best practices, inspiring the team to consistently up-level their work

• Ability to work quickly, adapting to new information when needed, and keen ability to inspire a team to design for quality and scale, while influencing processes that allow the team to invest their time in work that drives the most value for the business

• Experience designing and launching features across multiple device categories, including Living Room devices (Apple TV, Roku, Xbox, PlayStation, Fire TV etc.)

• Experience managing managers is preferred, but not required