Senior Manager, Product Design (f/m/d)

About The Opportunity

We're looking for a Senior Manager, Product Design to lead a team of product designers working across some of Contentful’s most foundational product areas: content performance optimization, application platform capabilities, business foundations, and design systems. Contentful is the composable content platform powering how the world's leading brands create, manage, and deliver digital experiences. These teams enable our platform's evolution as we build AI native features — turning ambitious product strategy into intuitive, well-crafted experiences for the customers and partners who build on Contentful every day. You'll balance strategic design leadership with people management: coaching designers, raising the bar on craft, and ensuring design has a strong voice in how these foundational parts of the platform take shape.

What To Expect?

• You'll manage designers across three product areas: content performance optimization, application platform capabilities, business infrastructure, and design systems. Optimization, Application Foundations and Business Foundations. While all teams strive to deliver solutions for a holistic, unified platform, each has a distinct focus.
• Our Optimization group focuses on advancing personalization and analytics capabilities.
• Our Application Foundations group includes design systems & information architecture, as well as workflows & automation tooling, and search & discoverability. Notably, the Contentful platform is built on our open source design system, Forma 36.
• The Business Foundations group focuses on identity & access, monetization, and platform insights.
• You'll manage a team of designers you can genuinely invest in — coaching career growth, shaping how they work, and giving them real ownership over their piece of the platform.
• You'll partner directly with product and engineering leadership on strategy, not just execution to shape how Optimization, Application Foundations, and Business Foundations evolve.
• You'll help define what AI-native design leadership looks like at Contentful, at a moment when the company is actively maturing that muscle. The Contentful platform includes AI powered customer facing features, and accordingly, we progressively evolve our design tooling and ways of working to take advantage of emerging technologies.
• You can be located in or near our London hub. The product designers you manage will be located in EMEA as well, distributed across London, Dublin and our Berlin headquarters. Your manager will be US based and you will collaborate with colleagues globally.
• Some travel is expected. The organization typically has training and/or workshops located in our Berlin headquarters, approximately quarterly.
• You will be joining at a pivotal moment: Contentful's recent acquisition by Salesforce puts this team's work in front of a massive new customer base, giving you a rare chance to help shape design at a large scale.

What You Need To Be Successful

• 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, not just translating requirements. You will influence roadmap decisions, represent design's perspective in cross-functional planning, and drive visioning initiatives.
• A strong customer-centric orientation. You ground design and product decisions in real customer insights and instill that same instinct across your team.
• A track record of design leadership that extends beyond your own team. Experience shaping and evolving the product design function’s practices within an organization.
• Maintain a high bar for design craft, with a portfolio reflecting strong interaction and visual design fundamentals. You set and uphold that same bar across your team by giving specific, actionable feedback that sharpens execution, not just strategy.
• A track record of leading design for complex, multi-team product areas. You should influence a coherent vision that translates across teams supporting a unified platform.
• Experience owning or contributing to a design system at scale; familiarity with design systems like Forma 36.
• Demonstrated success managing distributed, global teams.
• A genuine interest in AI-native product design, including shipping AI-powered customer-facing features, as well as evolving design tooling and workflows.
• Strong portfolio evidence of coaching designers' career growth. Experience facilitating promotions, skill development, and performance management.
• Comfort operating in a technically complex, enterprise/platform context. The interfaces and user flows we design operate within a headless, API first context and a mindset of ‘systems thinking’ is paramount.