About the Role
As PSYKHE grows, we are looking for a Product Design Manager who will step into a foundational leadership role — one that is equal parts practitioner, manager, and growth driver for the practice. This is a role for someone who leads by doing. You will carry your own body of work while managing and mentoring the team, shaping how product design is practised at PSYKHE, and contributing meaningfully to how we grow commercially. If you thrive at the intersection of rigorous design thinking, hands-on making, and building for the future of the discipline, this role was written for you.
Your Responsibilities
You will set and hold the standard for product design quality at PSYKHE, not just through direction, but through your own output. You lead complex, strategic design engagements for our clients across financial services, public sector, and enterprise, while ensuring the team around you is growing and delivering at a high standard.
- Lead product design delivery or oversight across multiple concurrent client engagements, working with cross-functional teams — ensuring work is consistently excellent, on time, and commercially conscious.
- Manage, mentor, and develop the product design team. Coach individuals to deepen their craft, build a culture of rigour and intellectual curiosity, and create the conditions for people to do their best work.
- Own hiring and resourcing for the product design team — defining roles, assessing and selecting talent, planning capacity, and matching the right people to the right engagements as the practice scales.
- Contribute actively to business development — participating in senior client conversations, supporting proposals and pitches, and helping PSYKHE grow through strong relationships and visible credibility in the market.
- Collaborate across PSYKHE's other disciplines — partnering with the Product Management and Strategy & Innovation teams to deliver integrated, multidisciplinary outcomes for clients.
- Stay genuinely current with industry practice: emerging methodologies, AI-enabled design workflows, new tooling, and evolving standards. You do not just read about what others are doing — you experiment with it, form a point of view, and bring it back to the team.
- Leverage AI as a force multiplier across the practice — building agentic workflows, automation scripts, Figma plugins, or custom tools that accelerate team productivity and raise the quality ceiling for everyone.
- Craft strategic narratives and design concepts that help clients understand not just what we are proposing, but why it matters.
- Set and govern design quality standards, reviewing work across projects and establishing practice assets — frameworks, documentation, templates — that make the team faster and better over time.
- Serve as a trusted advisor to key clients, building relationships in both formal and informal settings, and championing work that meets their business goals and user needs.
- Lead and contribute to PSYKHE's design community presence — through speaking, writing, open-source work, or other forms of visible contribution that build the practice's reputation externally.
Who You Are
You bring a rare combination of senior craft, leadership maturity, commercial awareness, and a genuine builder's mindset. You are the person others look to when the work gets hard, and you are still the one at the table with an opinion, a prototype, or a point of view.
- A strong designer, first. Your portfolio reflects depth of thinking and quality of execution — not just polished screens, but evidence of how you reason through complexity, make decisions, and improve outcomes for real users and real organisations. You are comfortable across visual design, interaction design, systems thinking, service design, and research.
- Hands-on by default. At the level this role operates, there is always a temptation to shift fully into direction and oversight. You stay close to the work, contribute directly, and lead by example.
- AI-fluent, not AI-dependent. You have moved well past using AI as a shortcut. You think critically about when and how to use it, you have built things with it — workflows, agents, productivity tools — and you have a point of view on what good looks like for AI-augmented design practice. You can advise clients on AI-enabled product design from a place of genuine experience, not just awareness.
- A builder in the deeper sense. You are curious about how things work under the hood — whether that is a design system, a Figma plugin, an AI agent, or a process nobody has documented yet. You have built things outside your job description because you wanted to, and you are proud of them.
- A visible practitioner. You share your thinking — through talks, writing, open-source contributions, or community involvement. You do not wait to have something worth saying. You already have a point of view, and you put it out into the world.
- A strong storyteller. You can define both strategic and creative points of view and present compelling narratives to clients, leadership, and your team — translating complexity into clarity with confidence.
- A genuine team builder. You give feedback that is direct and kind. You hold people to a high standard without making them feel small. You create the conditions for others to grow, and you are the kind of lead people want to work under.
- Commercially aware. You understand that design at a consultancy does not happen in isolation from client relationships, business outcomes, and commercial realities — and you navigate all of these with maturity and confidence.
- Versatile and systems-minded. Fluent across product design disciplines and comfortable balancing conceptual thinking with delivery rigour. You can hold the strategic conversation and then go and make the thing.
- A lifelong learner. You are genuinely curious and keep up with the evolution of the field — not to chase trends, but to stay useful and to push what is possible.
What You Bring
- A tertiary qualification in a design discipline.
- Significant experience (8+ years) in product design, with at least 2–3 years in a leadership or senior practitioner role.
- Impeccable design craft — a portfolio that demonstrates exceptional quality of execution across visual, interaction, and systems design, alongside the depth of thinking behind it.
- A track record of leading design delivery for B2C, B2B, and enterprise-level clients, ideally within a consultancy or embedded design engagement.
- Experience hiring, resourcing, and growing a design team — assessing talent, shaping roles, and managing capacity across concurrent engagements.
- Hands-on experience building with AI tools — workflow automation, agents, prototyping with code, or equivalent. This is not optional: we are looking for someone who has actually built things, not just used AI assistants.
- Experience contributing to business development — whether through proposals, pitches, client relationship-building, or thought leadership.
- Demonstrated community presence — speaking, writing, open-source work, or recognisable contributions to the design field.
- Advanced proficiency in Figma and the broader product design tool ecosystem, including prototyping and design systems tooling, as well as other emerging and adjacent tools in the field of AI and product design.
About the Company
PSYKHE is a strategic design consultancy on a mission to enable and deliver innovation that works. We partner with forward-thinking organisations across Asia to design products, services, and experiences that create real impact.
Our vision
To be the CX and design partner of choice for innovative, forward-thinking companies in Asia — and the employer of choice for ambitious, purposeful design talent.
What drives us
- Impact — We design work that creates measurable business and social impact.
- Soul — We put our heart into the work, and we do work that is worth putting our heart into.
- People — The values, mindsets, and behaviours of the people we design for sit at the heart of everything we do.
