Design Manager

Dovetail's mission is to enable the world to create better products and services through deep customer understanding. We empower 45,000+ people, from agencies to universities to Fortune 100 companies, to make sense of their customer research in one collaborative and powerful research platform.

We're building a team of incredibly talented product designers and researchers, working across our three products - Markup, Playback, and Backstage - as well as new products in the works. We're hiring our first design manager to help us grow the team, and scale design and research.

• Your responsibilities
• Be a great people developer.
• You'll be a strong coach and have the ability to bring the best out of people to help them achieve their ambitions. You'll push team members out of their comfort zone to drive their development and be able to evaluate their performance.
• Grow our design and research team.
• Help define what skills we need to build a balanced, high performing design team. You'll work closely with our talent team on recruitment and hiring. You'll also be responsible for designer and researcher onboarding, and ensuring new hires are set up for success.
• Scale design.
• We're a small but rapidly growing design team. Some things that are top of mind include how we maintain our high quality bar as we scale, how do we continue to evolve our design system with engineering, how can we work on cross-product problems, how do we pair together on problems, what rituals should we have, etc.
• Drive design employer branding.
• You'll work with the design team on employer branding activities to help position Dovetail as the best place to work for a designer or researcher in Sydney. Some examples include a public design blog, or publishing our design system, design events, speaking at conferences, etc.
• Your background
• Experience leading and managing a design team.
• You're comfortable helping individuals identify areas for improvement, providing timely guidance and motivating them to reach their goals, giving and receiving feedback, and steering the team towards success.
• Product design experience.
• You have a background as a professional product designer, working with sophisticated, modern cloud software.
• Comfortable building teams from the ground up.
• We're a small team and we're often doing things for the first time. You should be comfortable identifying roles and skills needed on the team, being involved in recruiting and hiring, creating growth plans, levels and skills frameworks, defining ways of working, and more.
• Attention to detail.
• You have a high quality bar and will be constantly looking at enhancing the experience for customers. We aren't opposed to pushing pixels and sweating the details - we're a detailed-oriented company that values quality!
• Highly collaborative working style.
• Experience working closely with adjacent roles, such as product managers and engineers, to plan, prioritise, and deliver projects.
• Stakeholder management.
• Confident in communicating product and design visions, framing challenges and opportunities, to stakeholders with the purpose of creating alignment, and driving towards an outcome.
• Excellent communication.
• Ability to convey opinions, thoughts, and feelings with other teammates, founders, and customers. Honest, thoughtful, and transparent communication is critical.
• Pragmatism.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, and shifting deadlines. Resourcefully solve problems, and able to make pragmatic trade-offs while holding a bigger, strategic goal in mind.
• A great attitude.
• The right attitude towards a sense of urgency, risk, and uncertainty about the future that comes with working at an early-stage startup. This is an opportunity to be involved in an exciting journey from the very start.
• Benefits
• Equity for everyone.
• We put our money where our mouth is. No matter your role, we provide equity for all along with competitive salaries. See your investment grow as Dovetail grows.
• Extra paid days off.
• Enjoy ad-hoc KitKat days to take a step back and spend it however you like. Hit the beach, spend time with your family, pick up that hobby you've been meaning to try, or anything in between!
• Equal parental leave.
• We offer an inclusive framework of 20 weeks equal paid leave to support new parents. Every family is unique, so you make the call how you'd like to take care of what matters most.
• Floating public holidays.
• Public holidays don't always align with when you want to take leave. So the choice is yours when it comes to swapping public holiday leave for a later date. You do you!
• Flexible work-life balance.
• We love our bright and shiny offices, celebrating wins together, and working on super collaborative and cross-functional projects. While our teams love coming together IRL, we also let you make the call on how and where you want to work
• Develop and grow.
• Take a course, attend a lunch and lear