Design Manager - UX

The Role of a Design Manager

Canvs is looking for a Design Manager to help manage design teams and deliver design solutions for our clients externally and products internally. You can read about the kind of clients we work with here.

As a Designer, you will be responsible for delivering high-impact but delightful user experiences along with delivering gold-standard visual design (user interface) and motion design when applicable to complement product strategy and messaging.

As a Design Manager, primarily, you will be responsible for correspondence with clients and steering conversations on product design strategy and progress tracking. You will also be responsible for managing & looking after teams of designers to make sure product designs and relevant deliverables are produced on time to a high specification.

What the Role Involves

Working on Design Deliverables

Working on high-quality deliverables basis the requirements of both external (client) and internal (product) projects. Deliverables are centred around user research, product flows, product structuring and wireframing and high-quality user interface design.

Develop Design Strategies

Design managers develop and implement successful design strategies, outlining how the design team will create deliverables and implement them for the project. Having a keen eye on the technology behind the product along with the business goals of the clientele is crucial.

Manage Design Teams

Design managers typically manage a team/teams of several designers, evaluating individual design deliverables and overall team performance. They also deliver critical feedback where needed and encourage team members throughout the duration of a project.

Collaborate with Various Teams

Design managers collaborate with other teams to ensure successful design and delivery of solutions. While primarily working alongside product and tech teams, they also collaborate closely with other stakeholders such as business, marketing, legal/compliance, etc.

Present Design Ideas

Once design strategies have been developed, design managers present them to management and other relevant stakeholders. While presenting, design managers speak to specific numbers and expected outcomes on the basis of the business and technical requirements of the client, all the while advocating for the user.

Evaluating Design Performance

Once a design has been finalized and implemented, design managers track and evaluate feedback in order to iteratively improve the initial design solutions. This often involves filtering through customer surveys and responses to focus groups to create an overall picture of how well the design performed. Understanding design successes is important, but it is also crucial to have a finger on the pulse of what doesn't work, and how to improve.

Skills That We're Looking For

Design managers represent the design team and in turn represent Canvs in front of our clients. They represent how we work, talk, think and execute. Design managers are creative, innovative and communicative. They are deeply familiar with design standards and the strategies involved in creating good design. Objectively here are some qulities and skills we need our design managers to have:

Communication skills - The way you present design strategy, ideas, concepts, thoughts etc to clients represent how Canvs works. You are the strategy head of the team for the client and hence should be the one with all the answers for the project you are handling. You should know how to articulate design decisions, defend creative choices, explain thought processes, handle tricky timeline conversations and generally project the confidence that clients fundamentally want to see in the design teams they engage with.

• Innovation – design managers introduce innovation into every project they manage, thinking of new ways to create unique strategies that have a meaningful impact on customers. It is also crucial that the design managers have a firm understanding of the design tools implemented by the design teams in order to stay completely connected with the solutions sets being provided.
• Keen Sense of Craftsmanship - design managers in the team not only manage design teams in delivering solutions but are also comfortable with working hands-on with the team to produce solutions for the client and internal project work.
• Conflict management – since they manage a team of multiple designers, design managers should be able to manage and resolve conflicts and bottlenecks between individual team members, different teams and when need be, with clientele.
• Negotiation skills – working with other teams to implement changes to a product’s design, design managers influence others, leading them to understand why certain design aspects matter more than others, this also applies to delivering clear rationale in design to the clients in order to facilitate smoother deliveries.
• Articulate and Resourceful – design managers are good leaders that are able to deliver clear feedback to their team members. Design managers are also crucial in synthesizing product requirement documents to deliver their full value in the design process.
• Deadline management – design managers ensure strict team and project deadlines are met along with maintaining multiple separate timelines across different design teams.
• Persistence - most importantly, a good Design 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 12-14LPA (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. Work from home but based out of Mumbai: We are situated out of Powai, Mumbai but work remotely. Given you will be a design manager, you shall be having in person client conversations and workshops. While you will work from your home on any average day, you will be expected to travel every now and then. Given most of our clients are based out of Mumbai, things are naturally simpler if you are based out of Mumbai. Otherwise, we'll encourage you to work from wherever you want 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 7 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.

Send us a link to your work, with a short intro about who you are at: [email protected]