Product Design Manager, Platforms, Plan, and Analytics

An overview of this role

GitLab is looking for a Product Design Manager to join the Plan & Analytics stage. As a design leader, you own the delivery of UX commitments, are always looking to improve productivity, and are responsible for the user experience in the product. While you are credible as a designer and know the details of what product designers work on, your time is spent hiring a world-class team and putting them in the best position to succeed.

This is an incredibly exciting time to join the Plan & Analytics stages - Working in GitLab's Plan space sits at the most human and strategic layer of the software development lifecycle — where ideas, priorities, and intentions are formed — making it the perfect frontier to explore how AI can augment not just execution, but thinking itself. As AI accelerates the speed at which code is written and shipped, the Plan space becomes even more critical, because the bottleneck is rapidly shifting from "how fast can we build?" to "how clearly can we define what to build and why?" This creates a rare opportunity to reimagine how teams collaborate, how requirements evolve, and how AI can transform a traditionally manual, document-heavy process into a dynamic, intelligent system that connects strategy directly to delivery.

You'll be working closely with the Product Management and Engineering teams to execute on the product roadmap and priorities.

Some examples of our projects: 

• Work Items
• Saved Views
• Software Factory

What you’ll do  

• Proactively identify large, strategic UX opportunities that span both inside your areas and across the product. Work with other product design managers, staff, and principal product designers to drive cross-product initiatives through awareness and prioritization.
• Identify strategic user research initiatives that span multiple stage groups (and possibly the entire product), and work with other product design/research managers to organize research efforts.
• Be a frequent and active participant in milestones by reviewing UX deliverables (such as research and designs) that your team creates, and provide feedback to ensure high-quality output.
• Communicate the value of UX to cross-functional GitLab team members and work with them to leverage the product development flow. 
• Help the product teams of areas you support to prioritize UX initiatives including Deferred UX, triage and resolution of UX bugs, and overall usability improvements to the product. Lead UX Scorecard initiatives in order to consistently measure the experience of your product areas and show improvements over time.
• Contribute to product direction conversations, with emphasis on leading the experience vision for your product areas.
• Hire, grow and retain a world-class team of Designers.

What you’ll bring 

• Experience managing a group of designers remotely, who work on complex products.
• Deep experience building AI experience for the software development lifecycle.
• Deep experience designing for large-scale enterprise platforms.
• Experience defining/executing on the high-level strategy (the why) and creating design deliverables (the how) based on research.
• Experience driving organizational change with cross-functional stakeholders, including Product Management and Engineering.
• Solid visual awareness with understanding of basic design principles and accessibility.
• You share our values, and work in accordance with those values.
• You possess leadership qualities needed to thrive at Gitlab.
• Ability to use GitLab.

About the team

You will work closely with three designers. You will collaborate with the Group Product Manager, Engineering Director and UX Researcher to improve team communication and maintain excitement about the opportunities ahead. You can learn more about what our teams are working on by visiting our direction page:

• Plan