Design Manager

Introduction
Thomas J. Watson said it best: “Good design is good business.” Visualization is critical to discovering data-driven insights and effectively communicating that knowledge to others. Designers at IBM work to create experiences that work together, work the same, and work for our clients. Does the thought of creating the platform at the heart of solutions like Watson, Blockchain, IoT, and Security excite you?  If so, read on!

Your Role and Responsibilities
IBM Sustainability Software is responsible for creating software products that help our customers optimize operations and cost, while reducing waste and emissions. We are looking for a Design Manager to guide a mixed-discipline design team and empower them to deliver exceptional end-to-end customer experiences for the B2B Integration market. IBM’s B2B Integration product is a multi-enterprise cloud-based business network that helps streamline, automate and fully digitize B2B transactions, augmenting the power of EDI with API capabilities.

You will manage a team that includes UX and visual design, design research, and content design. The experienced leader will mentor designers with various creative backgrounds and career experiences and set up the design team for success. You will also drive stakeholder alignment and demonstrate impact and influence on the product roadmap. Rigor, attention to detail, insatiable curiosity, comfort with ambiguity, excellent time management, and ability to conduct hard conversations with empathy will be critical to your success.
Responsibilities

• Deliver on a customer-centered strategy by setting high-level design goals to ensure a consistent and engaging experience.
• Shape the design culture by setting a high bar for performance and design excellence, and addressing performance misalignment in a prompt and human-centered manner.
• Steward design from discovery to released product, ensuring customer insights are collected and incorporated at each stage.
• Own operational outcomes, managing project tasks and deliverables using agile methodologies.
• Drive alignment by collaborating with developers, marketers, product managers and other design teams to drive a shared understanding of users’ needs and behaviors.
• Pursue disciplined innovation, with emphasis on cross-functional collaboration, experimentation, and learning.
• Communicate, collaborate, and innovate — promoting positive cross-discipline product culture.
• Make data-driven decisions –from one source of truth– with a bias for understanding and action.
• Promote an environment of psychological safety for interpersonal risk-taking that allows the design team to spend more time towards high-performance goals.
• Review designs of the multi-skilled design teams, improving the work while growing the designers and supporting their career development.
• Foster a team culture of diversity and transparent collaboration.
• Advocate for and facilitate human-centered design in everyday work.
• As a first-line manager, you will also contribute to and own management-related initiatives for the Sustainability Software design organization. Examples of these initiatives include metrics reporting, engagement surveys and retrospectives, and organizational planning.

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

• At least 5+ years of experience that demonstrates strategy, leadership, and collaboration on complex problems.
• 3+ years experience as a design lead/people manager.
• Demonstrated evidence of managing relationships across the stakeholder spectrum (internally and externally with clients).
• Known for transformational leadership and sustained record of excellent design work and leadership.
• Experience leading teams towards the successful delivery of high-quality designs to market.
• Contributes to developing strong leadership pipeline.

Preferred Technical and Professional Expertise

• Experience in enterprise software design and delivery
• Experience in mobile and desktop design and delivery
• Portfolio of previous work in either UX, design research, or content design that demonstrates an understanding of design best practices.
• Experience working with acquired products (either as the acquiring company or the acquired company)