Sr. Manager, Product Design - Shopping Experience

OVERVIEW

Every year, people across the world spend nearly one trillion dollars on groceries. It’s an industry that’s been around for centuries. Food itself, however, has been a constant in people’s lives since the beginning of time. Yes, sustenance is essential, but it’s also much more than that. Food can be a part of a daily ritual or a special moment that resonates with people on a meaningful and emotional level. It can be a much-needed break in a long day, a taste that brings back memories, a creative experiment, a shared meal with loved ones, or even comfort during a hard time. Whether it’s a special occasion or an everyday occurrence, it should always be easy for people to get the ingredients they need.

The Instacart Design Team is dedicated to making grocery shopping effortless for everyone and finding solutions to large-scale opportunities that will forever change the way people feed themselves and their loved ones. We’re a four sided marketplace and design for the needs of Consumer, Shoppers, Retailers, and Advertisers.

The Instacart design team focuses on designing, building & landing multi-platform product experiences that make grocery shopping effortless and create economic opportunity for our shoppers. The team crafts solutions for large-scale challenges that will change the way people feed themselves and their loved ones.

ABOUT THE JOB

We’re looking for a Design leader who will help shape and build the digital experience for our core shopping journey while maintaining a balance with the needs of our 4-sided marketplace ecosystem. As the Product Design Sr Manager, you will work closely with Instacart’s cross-functional leaders to define product strategy and vision while directing a team of designers to build performant, stunning, and undeniably useful experiences that are driven by our consumers’ overt and latent needs. This role is designed for a leader who will bias towards craft than pure people management. We are seeking someone who loves building design culture, can instill incredibly supportive ways of working, and will maintain the highest quality of craft in everything we ship.

ABOUT YOU

Minimum Qualifications

• You bring exceptional clarity and vision to identifying opportunities and framing problems.
• You are a leader who loves to engage directly in the design and craft work as much as you like developing and growing talent capabilities on your team.
• You have a remarkable ability to set and evolve the vision of a product experience through your strategic storytelling, problem driven frameworks, insight gathering, eye for visual design languages and interactive design craft.
• You have set new standards around design in your previous work and can demonstrate major shifts in quality, capabilities and perspective from your team.
• Deep understanding for how to motivate design work through explorations, concept development, and creative directions that draft off a core brand design system.
• Operationally effective at structuring and managing existing roadmaps and future horizon planning with comfort in adjusting to pivots or new opportunities that might influence a defined plan.
• You are an expert at setting up rituals and rhythms for a design team - ones that drive a nurturing culture for growth and for ensuring razor sharp clarity of focus and priority.
• You lead with clarity and vision, and you can motivate others to deliver excellent results while keeping them fulfilled and growing in their craft.
• Reliable self-starter who can provide direction to teams and designers at a 40,000 ft. level and at a pixel-level (whichever is most needed in the moment)
• Track record of influencing product and engineering functions to keep user problems top-of-mind and invest in holistic, future-friendly solutions
• 10+ years of experience in consumer facing digital product design work - ideally with brand-driven, retail or commerce products.
• 4+ years of managing multi-discipline teams of 5 or more.
• You foster collaboration, growth, and inclusivity within your team, empowering designers to contribute their best work toward a shared vision.

Preferred Qualifications

• You love to study and design for consumer behaviors with a specific interest in consumerism, retail, nutrition, food and evolving cultural norms.
• You believe in the power of brand, a well-articulated point of view, and the necessity of driving measurable business outcomes.
• A deep love and bias for designing products that blend interaction design with brand identity, visual design language and content design.
• You are very comfortable directing and tuning every aspect of a digital experience including: visual, motion, content, system, and interactive design.