Project Manager - Design

Canvs is looking for a Project Manager to help manage design projects and deliver design solutions for our clients externally and products internally. You can read about what we do, here.

As a Project manager in Design, you’ll help with everyday project coordination, protecting project timelines, assisting designers and design managers, managing client conversations and ensuring the projects you are responsible for deliver successfully.

The roles of a Project Manager in Design

Project coordination

Project managers coordinate and collaborate with other teams to ensure successful design and delivery of solutions. Project managers will work primarily with client project managers, internal alongside design and tech teams. They’ll also collaborate closely with other client stakeholders such as business, marketing, legal/compliance, etc.

Comprehensive project planning, operational execution and delivery

Delivery is a massive part of project management at Canvs. You will be expected to know more about the project, its timelines, its people and its parts than anyone else. This entails,

• being able to scope out projects,
• convincing clients of the practicality of timelines
• predicting and preventing potential collapses
• orchestrating various parties towards a common goal

You’ll be expected to know/learn modern project management tools and techniques. You’ll employ them and leverage them to execute and run your projects.

Design operations and tools

While working on Design projects you’ll handle design tools like Figma, Cassini, Lottie, Zeplin etc. You will be expected to know how to handle basic changes in design without needing designer assistance, organize and manage design files, build prototypes based on designer directions etc. In effect you will be involved in freeing up designers from some of the tedious design ops work.

Handling design feedback

A huge part of running design projects is being able to handle, understand and relay design feedback to collaborating designers correctly and on time.

Client conversations

A good part of your work would involve talking to your clients who entrust you with their work. You will be expected to be excellent at interpersonal dynamics, people management, conversational skills and presentability.

Project documentation

Canvs takes documentation very seriously. Project documentation includes making, handling and saving BRDs, meeting notes, plans, designs, codebases among other things. Good documentation is critically foundational to healthy, well executed, long-term projects.

Knowing the design team, its people, their skills and their schedules

While operating inside a design team, delivering design projects, you will be required to know which designers are good for what specific tasks, what their schedules are like and how to work with them. Knowing designer schedules and their individual skillsets is critical to your job as a project manager while delivering design projects with design teams.

Quality assurance

Design projects are generally multi-month, multi-party exercises and require constantly monitoring the quality of delivery, file organisation, project health and sometime craft. You shall be expected to maintain certain delivery standards in your projects that we shall train you for.

Skills That We're Looking For

Project managers are creative & innovative, familiar with design standards and the strategies involved in creating good design. Canvs is looking for project managers who have the following qualities:

Planning and systems thinking

Operating within large scale projects demands the ability to visualize timelines, plan processes, make room for contingencies and do all this while being aware of your team. Being able to break down large projects in your mind, and have a running understanding of a project’s health, timelines, blind spots, deliverables etc will be expected of you as a Project manager at Canvs. You’ll be the one who has a full cross section understanding of your project at any point of time.

Communication and People skills

People are the biggest dependencies for projects. How well you can communicate with others, get others to work with you and towards agendas that you need to deliver on determine how successful your projects and ultimately you are as a PM. Dealing with people should be your forte, and not something you are looking to learn on the job.

Deadline management

Project managers ensure strict team and project deadlines are met along with maintaining multiple separate timelines across different design teams.

Subject matter awareness - Design alignment

As a project manager operating in Design, we expect you to have an above average understanding of User experience design, its vocabulary, its tools and the various jobs in its orbit. This shall be critical in understanding the scale and scope of projects, measuring the practicality of timelines, being hands on when required and having answers when needed.

Diligence and discipline

You’ll be operating in large, multi-month, ongoing projects. Staying on top of timelines and schedules as an ongoing, long term manner of work will only be possible if you as an individual are diligent and disciplined about your work.

Proactivity

Proactivity in project management pays off just as much as discipline does. Knowing whom to contact for what upcoming tasks, sensing what requirements need to be gathered so upcoming tasks don’t get caught up in cascading delays, reaching out to members on the client side early to get their attention on issues are all examples of how proactivity becomes a critical part of your life as a project manager.

Being organized

Being organized is a baseline skills at Canvs and this shall be expected just as much from you if not more. Having an organized conversation process, documentation structure, roadmap will be highly critical in being effective in this role. Your meeting notes, design reviews, project documentation, references, personal notes, timelines etc shall have to be well organized and understandable by your peers working with you.

Conflict management and resourcefulness

Every now and then, somebody drops the ball and projects go off track. It’s common for conflicts to appear during such moments in projects. Firstly, you’ll be expected to anticipate such collapses and warn the concerned parties. If such conflicts still arise, you’ll be expected to get in, deal with people with maturity, keep a cool head and find a way out of the situation. You will be the person that project participants look forward to having because you can be trusted to keep the project within its guardrails of performance.

Persistence

Most importantly, a good Project Manager needs to be persistent. When things don't go their way, they find a way around it. The first solution is rarely ever the right solution, requirements change and are sometimes totally unknown (it happens). At times like these, being able to persist counts.

Compensation and Benefits

Compensation

We are offering an annual salary of INR 10LPA (CTC) for this role.

Further, depending on how the firm does in a year and how you perform you receive a compensation bonus at the end of the year.

Benefits

1. Remote work: We are situated out of Powai, Mumbai but work remotely. You can work from anywhere in India as long as you are able to work without disruptions and are available all times during work hours. You are free to work from anywhere. However, we hold in-person meetings frequently for which your presence shall be required.
2. Leaves: We take flexibility seriously. While we do not penalize leaves as a principle and have a well documented leave policy that states how this works. This liberty of course comes with the responsibility of being judicious about your leaves lest it affects your work and the work of others in your team.
3. Health Insurance - Canvs provides medical insurance cover for you and your family (spouse and children). It comes with additional benefits like dental, appointments, mental health consultations etc.
4. Learning budget - Given the line of work we are in, learning is super important to us. So you can pick up courses and upskill yourself we provide a learning budget of INR 10k per year per person.
5. Tools for the trade - Remote work comes with different setup requirements. Anything you need to be able to do your best work, you’ll have it.

About Canvs & Our Culture

For more than 8 years, we've been proving that you don't need to be a big company to have a big impact. From running an entirely distributed, remote-first company years before it became the norm, to our unique blend of designers and design managers working together as an extension of our client's teams - we've always strived and mostly succeeded at punching above our weight.

Our culture, ever-evolving as it is, bases itself on a few simple principles. We get the job done but we don't play it safe. We've been working in a distributed fashion from Day 1 - so trust and transparency are crucial. Both within the team, and with our clients and partners. We celebrate our successes and own up to our mistakes - learning from them while fixing them - and potentially never repeating them. We believe in partnerships over one-nighters. We like our teammates and our clients to stick around, and we do what it takes to make that happen.

We believe in processes and are sticklers for them sometimes, but we also believe ultimately those processes are built around 'people'. Can't make it to a meeting? We've been Zooming into meetings before that became a verb. Something came up and you need to be away for a while - that's ok - we trust you enough to know you made sure someone else can hold the fort in the meantime, and we trust each other to know we'll do our best to hold the fort while you're gone. You go deal with what you need, keep us posted, and let us know how we can help.

We prioritize milestones over deadlines. Deadlines can be arbitrary. Milestones – when planned well – are a far better indicator of a project's overall health. We ensure quality by planning ahead and planning well.

Last but most importantly - we are an infinitely curious team - always learning, always exploring. We're rarely happy going as far as needed, only to stop there. We learn and we share constantly. As we get better at it internally, we're starting to share what we read and learn with the world. Go check out our newsletter and our editorial.

If you're good at what you do, are easy-going, and looking to learn and share knowledge with a curious team - we're pretty sure we'll get along well. Things you might need to know, we'll teach you if you promise to teach us the things you're really good at.

Come join us - we're just getting started.