Lead Product Design Manager

Who are we

Founded in 2014 by Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar, Whatfix is a leading global B2B SaaS provider and the largest pure-play enterprise digital adoption platform (DAP). Whatfix empowers companies to maximize the ROI of their digital investments across the application lifecycle, from ideation to training to the deployment of software. Driving user productivity, ensuring process compliance, and improving user experience of internal and customer-facing applications.

Spearheading the category with serial innovation and unmatched customer-centricity, Whatfix is the only DAP innovating beyond the category, positioning itself as a comprehensive suite for GenAI-powered digital adoption, analytics, and application simulation. Whatfix product suite consists of 3 products - DAP, Product Analytics, and Mirror. This product suite helps businesses accelerate ROI on digital investments by streamlining application deployment across its lifecycle.

Whatfix has seven offices across the US, India, UK, Germany, Singapore, and Australia and a presence across 40+ countries.

About the Role

We're looking for a Design Lead to join our Product Design and User Research team, where you'll help define our DAP experience strategy and guide a team of talented designers toward successful outcomes.

This role is both strategic and hands-on, ideal for someone who thrives in a player-coach capacity. You'll play a key role in expanding the DAP category and shaping how our multiple products work together to create greater value, developing strategies that seamlessly integrate them to drive cohesive, user-centered solutions across the ecosystem.

As a design leader, you can coach and support your teams to thrive in fast-paced, hyper-growth environments. You'll have experience working with product and engineering leaders throughout the product development life-cycle as you manage and support your design team.

Our designers are strong strategic thinkers and problem solvers who work on industry-defining innovations that are creating a new category. As our ideal candidate, you can oversee, support, and empower the designers to do their best work. You're capable of zooming out to set the team vision and drilling down to the details to help solution and assess the polish of the work.

You understand the importance of building a strong team culture, building trust, creating collaborative relationships with our product and engineering partners to innovative solutions through human-centered design, and upskilling everyone around them in the process.

What you'll do

• Lead and manage Design for our DAP Tribe, one of 4 Tribes within Whatfix
• Work with Design leadership and cross-functional partners to align DAP strategy to overall business goals and product strategy.
• Help to define the DAP design vision that supports our product strategy and actively align design teams efforts to achieve it.
• Drive the design quality, practice, and offerings for our DAP product line that meet our business, customer, and end-user goals.
• Lead and mentor a team of DAP designers through the end-to-end design process, championing and encouraging innovation, creative thinking, new ideas and solutions.
• Own craft and capability output across key DAP projects, ensuring each project deliverable is of the highest quality and meets the Design teams defined standards.
• Represent the needs and voice of the user wrt to our DAP offering, championing these needs with cross-functional partners to help prioritize planning and process.
• Act as a strategic partner to product and technology leads on DAP to ensure prioritization and delivery of key products and features through an inclusive design process.
• Assess performance and provide career guidance for members of the DAP design team.

What We're Looking For:

• Industry Experience: 5-7 years relevant industry experience
• Hands-on Leadership: 2-3 years of experience managing designers, with a player-coach hands-on mentality. We are not looking for just a people-manager.
• Fostering Creative Environments: Experience creating environments where design teams can do high-quality, creative, hypothesis-driven work.
• Human centered approach: Proven experience with driving and applying human-centered design processes while collaborating with customers, engineering, product management, and user researchers.
• Collaborative Mindset: Strong communicator and team player, comfortable working across product teams to break down silos and drive collective success.
• Craftsmanship & Execution: A deep commitment to design excellence and attention to detail, ensuring user-centered solutions are validated and aligned with business goals.
• Strong Portfolio: A strong portfolio that represents the outcomes of your approach, contributions as a design leader, and shipped work to a mass market.
• Proactive communicator: Highly proactive with exceptional communication and interpersonal skills.

Why You'll Love This Role:

• Our team is at the forefront of building and expanding the DAP category. You'll have the chance to lead cutting-edge design projects that truly shape how people interact with digital tools.
• You'll coach your team to thrive in a fast-paced, hyper-growth environment while driving innovation through human-centered design.
• As a catalyst for creativity, you'll work on solving complex, diverse challenges that deliver real value for our customers and our business.

Reporting Structure: This role reports directly to the Global Head of Design and UX Research.