SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Mistral is a full-stack AI company providing frontier models, developer tools, applications, and compute infrastructure. The company partners with enterprises across finance, manufacturing, defense, healthcare, and the public sector to co-create customized AI systems.
As Product Operations Manager (Design), you will own the operational infrastructure of Mistral's design team. This is a founding-stage role where you build the design operations discipline from scratch—defining cadences, rituals, decision-making forums, and coordination mechanisms that allow designers to focus on design rather than administrative overhead.
Key responsibilities include:
- Define and maintain the design team's operating system: weekly and quarterly cadences, leadership syncs, planning, retros, and share-outs.
- Own how the team tracks and surfaces work, establishing a single source of truth for status and decision records.
- Coordinate cross-functional interlocks between Brand & Marketing and Product & Product Design to surface dependencies early and align design work with go-to-market timing.
- Design decision-making forums that ensure decisions are made, recorded, and not relitigated.
- Distinguish between rituals that create alignment and overhead that should be eliminated.
- Automate repetitive coordination, reporting, and tracking using AI tools to reduce administrative burden.
- Bring product operations tools to the design team: data and analytics for transparent reporting, structured feedback loops, and launch coordination.
- Partner with marketing, product managers, engineering, and GTM teams to ensure design work is visible and aligned with product release cycles.
You will report to the Head of Product Operations and work day-to-day with the Head of Design and the design team. This is a team-of-one role with a founding mentality—you will build discipline from scratch, automate where helpful, and coordinate people where it matters.
Requirements:
- 6–10 years of experience in design operations, product operations, program management, or chief-of-staff roles within creative or product organizations.
- Founding design-ops mindset: demonstrated ability to build operational disciplines from scratch, not just maintain inherited ones.
- Comfort automating with AI tools to eliminate repetitive overhead, combined with strong people-coordination and coalition-building skills without formal authority.
- Strong systems thinking: ability to design repeatable rhythms and processes, not just run meetings.
- Design literacy: enough background to understand designer pain points and be credible with the design team.
- Make-it-happen attitude: positive, action-biased, focused on unblocking rather than escalating.
- Excellent communication and synthesis skills: ability to turn scattered signals into a shared source of truth.
- Ability to thrive in ambiguity and define your own scope in a role with no playbook and no team to delegate to.
