Senior Product Design Manager (6-month Term)

Senior Product Design Manager

Initial Term: 6-month assignment, with potential for regular full-time conversion based on business need and performance

The Senior Product Design Manager will lead the design of clear, intuitive, and scalable product experiences across CharacterStrong's digital platform. This role will be responsible for shaping the structure, navigation, workflows, and overall usability of complex product experiences while ensuring design decisions align with product priorities and user needs.

This leader will directly oversee UX designers, providing direction, coaching, feedback, and quality oversight while also fully engaging in the work. The position requires deep expertise in information architecture, design systems, interaction design, and UX problem-solving, with the ability to guide both strategy and execution.

This coach-player role will bring order to complexity, strengthening experience quality across our digital experiences, and lead the UX team to produce engaging, coherent, and innovative solutions.

This position is structured as a contract-to-hire opportunity. The selected candidate will begin in an initial contract engagement for approximately 6 months, with the potential to transition into a regular full-time role based on performance, business need, and mutual fit.

CharacterStrong's Background & Mission

CharacterStrong, a FullBloom Company, is a fast-paced, tech education company that makes PreK-12 digital, social-emotional learning curricula and offers professional learning opportunities to support schools with implementation. There's currently a team of more than 90 full-time employees and over 30 contractors and interns collaborating to bring this work to life. Our mission is to create a more loving world by equipping educators with tools to teach the critical social, emotional, and character skills necessary to foster a more empathetic, connected, and generous world. In less than 10 years, our aim is to have reached 50 million students and over 2 million educators. We were ranked by INC. as the 449th fastest-growing private company in the country.

At CharacterStrong, you will have the opportunity to positively impact education, both in the United States and internationally. CharacterStrong employees offer their innovation, dedication to excellence, and compassion to help produce transformational curricula and professional learning for educators.

CharacterStrong's Company Values & Norms

• We Produce Excellence - Producing timely, quality results and consistently asking the question, "How can we make this 1% better?"
• We Take Full Ownership - Taking initiative to drive work forward, demonstrating responsibility when things do not go according to plan, and being proactive in closing identified gaps.
• We Practice Kindness - Exercising inclusion, care, and empathy with others, balancing honesty with compassion, and cultivating the well-being of self and others.
• We Problem-Solve - Identifying issues, analyzing for understanding, and taking action to implement the best possible solution.

Key Responsibilities

Product Design Leadership

• Lead product design and UX efforts across the digital platform, with a focus on information architecture, user journeys, accessibility, usability, and consistent design system execution.
• Define and evolve navigation systems, content hierarchy, interaction patterns, and end-to-end user flows.
• Translate product priorities, user needs, jobs to be done, and business goals into clear UX direction and actionable design solutions.
• Ensure experiences are intuitive, efficient, and scalable across complex product areas.
• Oversee accessibility, ensuring all experiences meet WCAG AA standards and inclusive design principles.
• Balance design quality with business timelines and engineering constraints, ensuring solutions are high-impact while meeting critical release and launch windows.
• Champion innovation and continuous learning, leveraging emerging tools, systems, and best practices to improve design efficiency and output quality.

Team Leadership & UX Oversight

• Directly manage and support UX designers, including providing strategic coaching in IA and UX best practices to elevate the team's independent execution.
• Review UX design work regularly to ensure quality, consistency, and alignment with product goals, business and user needs.
• Help the team move effectively from ambiguity to clarity through strong problem framing, design critique, and strategic decision-making.
• Establish expectations for design artifacts, workflows, and collaboration so the team can execute with consistency, clarity, and confidence.
• Foster a healthy, thoughtful, and accountable product design culture grounded in clarity, ownership, and continuous improvement.

Design System Governance

• Work closely with UX/UI designers, developers, and other stakeholders to integrate the design system into the product development process.
• Ensure consistency in design across products by enforcing adherence to and governing maintenance of an evolving design system.
• Manage versioning of the design system to ensure that updates are communicated effectively and legacy components are phased out responsibly.
• Guide and maintain thorough documentation, including usage guidelines, best practices, and training resources for team members to effectively utilize the system.
• Audit the design system and implementation for WCAG AA accessibility compliance.

Information Architecture & UX Execution

• Set the standard for early alignment in priority initiatives by creating high-level frameworks (user flows, journey maps, wireframes, prototypes) that serve as blueprints for the broader design team.
• Simplify complex or fragmented product experiences through stronger information architecture and workflow design.
• Identify friction points and opportunities across the product experience and drive practical improvements.
• Adhere to a human-centered design process by using available insights, supporting usability testing, and gathering SME feedback to inform design decisions while keeping robust or formal research ownership outside the core scope of the role.
• Use available customer feedback, product data, and team insights to inform design decisions, while keeping formal research ownership outside the core scope of the role.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner with the Senior Director of Product Development to align design requirements with product strategy and user stories, ensuring evidence-based insights and prioritization reflect validated user needs
• Coach and empower UX/UI designers to partner effectively with Product Managers, ensuring they lead the design's voice within the 'Iron Triangle' to shape solution direction and clarify requirements.
• Collaborate with Engineering to ensure design solutions balance user value with technical feasibility.
• Work with cross-functional stakeholders to align on priorities, make tradeoffs visible, and improve confidence before development begins.
• Partner with the Senior Art Director to ensure ongoing brand alignment in an evolving design system and product design execution.

Ideal Profile

• 8+ years in product design, with 3+ years leading designers for complex digital products, ideally in SaaS, edtech, or multi-user platforms.
• Mastery in information architecture, interaction design, navigation systems, and user journeys.
• A strong portfolio demonstrating end-to-end ownership of complex product experiences.
• Experience managing, mentoring, or leading product designers with clear standards and strong design critique.
• Demonstrated ownership of overseeing usability testing across the design lifecycle, translating user insights into clear, actionable improvements to product experiences
• Proven track record of implementing Accessibility (A11y) standards at scale within a design system.
• Expertise in navigating ambiguity by asking the right questions, facilitating alignment across departments, and establishing a clear, structured design path forward.
• Strong cross-partnership and communication skills, including the ability to explain rationale, influence priorities, and move work forward collaboratively.
• Experience leading, building, and governing design systems, including adoption, scalability, and accessibility integration.
• Good judgment in using feedback, data, SME, and user input to inform design without functioning as a dedicated research leader.

Other Duties:

• Perform additional responsibilities aligned with business needs and evolving growth goals.

Benefit Package

• Company laptop and other needed equipment provided
• 401k Savings Plan with employer contribution
• Medical, Dental, & Vision Insurance
• Life, AD&D, and Disability Insurance
• Employee Assistance Program, Mental Health Support, and Well-Being Programs
• Flexible Time Off, Paid Sick Days, Paid Company Holidays

CharacterStrong views diversity and the unique ways team members establish connections with our student and educator populations as an asset. Our goal is to ensure we have a team at CharacterStrong that reflects the diverse student population we serve.

CharacterStrong is an equal opportunity employer. We provide for fair treatment of all employees