SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Contentful, now part of Salesforce, is seeking a Senior Manager of Product Design to lead a team of product designers across foundational platform areas: content performance optimization, application platform capabilities, business foundations, and design systems.
In this role, you will manage designers distributed across EMEA (London, Dublin, Berlin) and partner directly with product and engineering leadership on strategy. You'll balance people management—coaching career growth, raising design craft standards, and ensuring design has a strong voice in platform evolution—with strategic design leadership. Your responsibilities include:
• Managing designers across three product areas: Optimization (personalization and analytics), Application Foundations (design systems, information architecture, workflows, search), and Business Foundations (identity & access, monetization, platform insights)
• Coaching designers' career development, shaping performance management, and facilitating promotions
• Partnering with product and engineering at the strategy level to influence roadmap decisions and drive visioning initiatives
• Defining AI-native design leadership as Contentful matures this capability, including shipping AI-powered customer-facing features and evolving design tooling
• Maintaining and raising the bar for design craft across your team through specific, actionable feedback
• Leading design for complex, multi-team product areas and ensuring coherent vision across a unified platform
• Managing a distributed, global team with quarterly travel to Berlin headquarters for training and workshops
You'll be joining at a pivotal moment: Contentful's acquisition by Salesforce expands the platform's reach to a massive new customer base, giving you the opportunity to shape design at significant scale.
REQUIREMENTS:
• 8+ years of product design experience, including 3+ years directly managing and developing product designers, ideally at a B2B SaaS or platform company
• Strong track record of partnering with product and engineering leadership at the strategy level, influencing roadmap decisions and representing design's perspective in cross-functional planning
• Customer-centric orientation; ability to ground design decisions in real customer insights and instill this instinct across your team
• Design leadership experience that extends beyond your own team; track record of shaping and evolving the product design function's practices within an organization
• High bar for design craft with portfolio evidence of strong interaction and visual design fundamentals; ability to give specific, actionable feedback that sharpens execution
• Track record leading design for complex, multi-team product areas with ability to influence coherent vision across teams
• Experience owning or contributing to a design system at scale; familiarity with design systems like Forma 36
• Demonstrated success managing distributed, global teams
• Genuine interest in AI-native product design, including shipping AI-powered features and evolving design workflows
• Strong portfolio evidence of coaching designers' career growth and facilitating skill development
• Comfort operating in technically complex, enterprise/platform contexts; understanding of headless, API-first architecture and systems thinking
