Service Design Project Manager

We are looking for an organized, people-centered project manager to sit at the heart of our service design consultancy. You will be the connective tissue between executive partners, engagement leads, service designers, and clients- keeping design work moving, visible, and on track.

About the role

Service design engagements are complex: they span discovery through to delivery and must balance iterative ways of working with organizational accountability. This role exists to make that complexity manageable.

This is a full-time role with roughly half your time billable to client engagements and half dedicated to internal operations. Both halves matter equally.

You will own the operational rhythm of several engagement teams and internal initiatives-from daily stand-ups to client reporting-so that the design team can focus on doing their best work. You will not be expected to do the design work yourself, but you must understand it well enough to ask the right questions, spot risk early, and communicate progress clearly to a range of audiences.

Location: Atlanta, GA, or remote with travel


Level: Mid-level


Reports to: Principal of Design Operations


Benefits: Health, dental, vision coverage, 401 (k) matching, profit sharing

Key Activities

• Facilitate team operational rhythms: Own and facilitate the project's operational rhythm, including stand-ups, project health checks, and retrospectives.
• Maintaining the timeline: Work with the Engagement Lead to keep the project plan current, proactively flag schedule risks, replan after delays, and coordinate dependencies.
• Tracking progress & impact: Maintain trackers, dashboards, and client status reports. Chase updates and synthesize findings into clear impact summaries.
• Logging decisions: Maintain the decision log, document rationale and scope changes, and distribute records to relevant stakeholders in a timely way.
• Ad-hoc coordination and escalation: Respond to emerging blockers, secure approvals, align with dependent teams, and manage the unplanned coordination that is a natural part of complex consulting work.
• Internal operations support: Collaborate with the Principal of Design Operations to support the roll-out of internal operations programs and internal content management.

What We're Looking For

• Demonstrable experience managing complex, multi-workstream projects in a design, innovation, or professional services consultancy, not just internal projects or product delivery.
• Genuine curiosity about service design: you don't need to do the work, but you need to understand what good looks like well enough to ask the right questions and spot when something is off.
• Comfort operating in a dual role-part client-facing project lead, part internal operations contributor-and the self-management to switch between them without dropping either.
• Comfort in a small firm environment where structure is still being built. You'll help shape the way this role works, not inherit a fully defined playbook.
• Fluency in project management tools, including Productive, and the ability to work inside clients' systems (Jira, Asana, Notion) without needing hand-holding.
• Strong written communication: status reports, decision logs, and client-facing summaries that are clear, appropriately concise, and don't require editing before they go out.
• Facilitation skills that work in a room of senior stakeholders and a room of designers equally well.
• Close attention to detail in tracking and financial reporting-hours, actuals, budget burn-without losing sight of the bigger picture.
• A working style built on transparency and proactive communication. You flag early, you follow up proactively, and you don't wait to be asked.

Qualifications

Four to six years of project management experience, with at least two years inside a design, innovation, or professional services consultancy. Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience. Familiarity with design and iterative ways of working. PMP or similar certification is a plus, not a requirement.

About Harmonic

Harmonic Design is an eight-year-old service design consultancy headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. We help large organizations, primarily Fortune 500 companies and mission-driven nonprofits, close the gap between strategy and the experiences people actually have. Our work spans discovery through delivery: research, journey design, service concept development, and the development of organizational capability to sustain what we design together.

We are a team of about 25 people, a mix of full-time practitioners and contractors, who take the work seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. We are a studio, not a factory. Engagements are complex, client relationships are long, and the thinking we bring to our clients, we also bring to how we run the firm.

We are in an intentional period of growth. We are investing in operational infrastructure, leadership depth, and external partnerships to scale without losing what makes the work good. This role is part of that investment.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.