Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Product Design Manager role stands out in the SaaS landscape because it sits at the intersection of AI-powered product experience and the integration layer that determines whether a platform fits into real customer workflows. Dialpad is positioning design as a strategic function, and the remit across ecosystem, shared services, and integrations reflects a mature SaaS priority: making the core product extensible, coherent, and trustworthy as capabilities expand.
From a SaaS career perspective, the player coach model builds dual credibility that transfers across product-led organizations: shipping work personally while raising quality through critique, systems thinking, and cross-functional decision making. Work focused on integrations and shared surfaces tends to sharpen judgment around consistency, edge cases, and end-to-end journeys, which are recurring challenges in subscription products that evolve continuously. The emphasis on AI as a design medium also signals exposure to probabilistic UX and adoption patterns that are becoming common across SaaS categories.
This role fits a design leader who prefers hands-on influence over purely managerial distance, and who is comfortable navigating ambiguity with product and engineering partners. It will suit someone motivated by connective product work that touches many teams and customers, and who enjoys setting standards without becoming a bottleneck.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Your role
Help build the future of AI-powered business communications at Dialpad. The Dialpad Design team is an integral part of Dialpad’s success. We’re assembling a world-class team of curious problem-solvers who are passionate about keeping humans first in this new age of AI. We believe that great design is a strategic differentiator for Dialpad, but that differentiation doesn’t just happen. It takes a dedicated, collaborative team that works hard to advance Dialpad’s mission to empower businesses and their people to be wildly successful while doing career-defining work.
We’re looking for a Design Manager who leads as a true player/coach. This means that while you draw the best work out of the designers you manage—critiquing, mentoring, unblocking, and pushing them forward—you also take on work yourself. You know the craft well enough to teach it, and you're strong enough to demonstrate it when the moment calls for it. You don’t hide behind management.
You’ll lead a team of product designers working across our ecosystem, shared services, and integrations areas—the connective tissue that makes Dialpad work with the rest of our customers’ tools and workflows. This is a high-leverage area: every customer touches it, the design problems are often the hardest in the product, and the work directly shapes how AI capabilities extend across the broader business communications landscape.
This role is a great fit for someone who gets energy from both sides of the job—developing people and shaping pixels—and who sees AI not as a theme to reference but as a medium to design in. As our first design management hire in London, you’ll also be a foundational member of our growing Design team.
What you'll do
- Lead an international team of product designers shipping features and integrations that connect Dialpad with the broader ecosystem of tools customers rely on every day.
- Operate as a player/coach—most of your time is spent developing your team, but you’re expected to sit down and do the design work yourself when it’s the right call: pairing on a hard problem, fixing a rough flow, or raising the bar by example.
- Draw the best work out of your designers through critique, pairing, stretch assignments, and candid feedback—pushing them further than they’d push themselves.
- Set a high bar for the quality of work released and the pace at which it’s released.
- Coach designers to think in systems, design for AI’s probabilistic nature, and build trust through transparent, well-considered interactions.
- Partner closely with Product Management and Engineering counterparts in your area to set direction, schedules, and mark sharp tradeoffs.
- Represent design leadership in our growing London location.
- Use AI-assisted tools fluently in your own workflow and help your team adopt them in ways that compound their effectiveness.
Skills you'll bring
- 5+ years of product design experience with a portfolio that demonstrates range, craft, and shipped impact.
- 1-2+ years managing designers with portfolio pieces that clearly showcase not only your work but also ways you’ve helped your team’s work improve.
- Experience shipping AI-powered or AI-adjacent features, or strong evidence you’re actively building that muscle.
- Fluency with modern design tools (Figma, Lovable, Vercel, Claude Design, prototyping tools) and actively using AI tools in your design process.
- Direct experience giving and receiving rigorous critique, and a clear point of view on how good critique works.
- Strong written and verbal communication—you can explain your team’s work to senior leaders and your reasoning to skeptical engineers in the same week.
- Clearly identify opportunities where the team is slow, misaligned, or under-communicating, and bring proposals, not just observations.
- Be comfortable navigating ambiguity and leading complex, cross-functional initiatives end-to-end.
- Think in systems, designing cohesive end-to-end experiences rather than isolated screens.
- Communicate clearly and persuasively across disciplines, including with senior leadership.
- Care deeply about craft, detail, usability, and measurable product outcomes.
- Know how to set a high bar without becoming a bottleneck—and when to step in versus step back.
Bonus points for:
- Have experience designing AI-native products, conversational interfaces, voice UI, or automation workflows.
- Be fluent enough in front-end code or AI-assisted development to meaningfully pair with engineers—even ship code into production.
- A background as a strong individual contributor who moved into management deliberately, not by default.
All applicants must provide a portfolio that demonstrates both their leadership impact and their individual craft. We want to see the work you did alongside your team's—and understand how you moved between the two.
