Design Manager

Dovetail's mission is to improve the quality of every thing. We empower 85,000+ people, from agencies to universities to Fortune 100 companies, to make sense of their customer research in one collaborative and powerful research platform.

We’re building a team of incredibly talented product designers and researchers, working across our three products – Markup, Playback, and Backstage – as well as new products in the works. We’re hiring our first design manager to help us grow the team, and scale design and research.

• Develop our people. You’ll be a strong coach for individuals on the team by understanding their ambitions, helping them to identify personal goals, finding opportunities for them to grow, motiving team members to step out of their comfort zones, and steering them towards success.

• Grow our design and research function. Define what roles and skills we need to build a balanced, high performing team. You’ll work closely with our talent team on recruitment and hiring. You’ll also be responsible for designer and researcher onboarding, ensuring new hires are set up for success.

• Help us maintain our high quality bar. Our team and products are rapidly growing in size and complexity. As we grow, we need to ensure we maintain our high bar for the quality of the user experience. You’ll drive rituals, define principles, ways of working, etc. to help us achieve this.

• Help steer the design direction of our products. You’ll work very closely with our designers, as well as our product managers and engineers, on the product problems they’re working on. Get involved in design workshops, ideation sessions, sparring, blitz testing, etc. Have an opinion, and help steer the team towards success.

• Lead our design system. Help us scale our design system by facilitating ways of working with design and engineering.

• Evolve our design team culture. You’ll have an opinion on how we should work together as cross-functional design team. Some things that are top of mind include how we work on cross-product problems together, how do we pair on problems together, what rituals should we have as a team, facilitate team bonding, etc.

• Drive employer branding initiatives. Working with our employer branding team and the design team, you’ll driving employer branding activities to help position Dovetail as the best place for designers and researchers to work in Sydney. Some examples include a public design blog, or publishing our design system, design events, speaking at conferences, etc.

• Experience leading and managing a design team. You’re comfortable helping individuals identify areas for improvement, providing timely guidance and motivating them to reach their goals, giving and receiving feedback, and steering the team towards success.

• Product design experience. You have a background as a professional product designer, working with sophisticated, modern cloud software.

• Comfortable building teams from the ground up. We’re a small team and we’re often doing things for the first time. You should be comfortable identifying roles and skills needed on the team, being involved in recruiting and hiring, creating growth plans, levels and skills frameworks, defining ways of working, and more.

• Attention to detail. You have a high quality bar and will be constantly looking at enhancing the experience for customers. We aren't opposed to pushing pixels and sweating the details – we're a detailed-oriented company that values quality!

• Highly collaborative working style. Experience working closely with adjacent roles, such as product managers and engineers, to plan, prioritise, and deliver projects.

• Stakeholder management. Confident in communicating product and design visions, framing challenges and opportunities, to stakeholders with the purpose of creating alignment, and driving towards an outcome.

• Excellent communication. Ability to convey opinions, thoughts, and feelings with other teammates, founders, and customers. Honest, thoughtful, and transparent communication is critical.

• Pragmatism. Comfortable with ambiguity, and shifting deadlines. Resourcefully solve problems, and able to make pragmatic trade-offs while holding a bigger, strategic goal in mind.

• A great attitude. The right attitude towards a sense of urgency, risk, and uncertainty about the future that comes with working at an early-stage startup. This is an opportunity to be involved in an exciting journey from the very start.

At Dovetail, we’re passionate about building and fostering an environment where every team member feels supported and valued. We celebrate individualism, welcoming everyone to show up as their authentic selves every day. It’s no secret that diversity builds the best teams, large or small, so we highly encourage applications from people who identify as part of an under-represented group. Please take a peek at Dovetail’s commitment to Program 50/50 and hear why we’re officially a Great Place to Work on our careers page for more info!