Design Operations Manager

As the Design Operations Manager, Senior Associate within Digital, you will be responsible for planning and managing the day-to-day workflow and processes and reporting that support our growing digital design project work across Digital Customer Experience (DCE). You will lead delivery for complex programs and enable the design organization to operate efficiently and predictably. You will partner closely with design leads, product, technology, and finance/business management to align resources with strategic priorities, strengthen governance, and increase delivery transparency. In this role, you will enhance ways of working across teams by scaling effective practices, managing risks, and promoting adoption of tools and approaches (including AI and automation) that improve both quality and speed of delivery. We are looking for someone who can see the forest and the trees simultaneously and ensure we are solving the right problems the right ways as tooling and ways of working evolve.

Job responsibilities:

• Oversight and management of a digital product portfolio, including but not limited to intake, ensuring requests are well-framed and sequenced against customer impact and business values, prioritization, resourcing, and team capacity

• Drive clarity and execution readiness by aligning on problem definition, scope, ownership, outcomes/constraints, and “definition of ready” before work begins

• Lead cross-team dependency and issue management—facilitate working sessions, remove blockers, and escalate with clear options and recommendations

• Maintain portfolio visibility (in flight/next/blocked/at risk) and enable timely tradeoffs and decision-making with design and cross-functional leaders

• Partner with Digital Design, Product, and Line-of-Business partners to translate demand into capacity and resourcing plans; verify deliverables and handoffs are clearly defined and agreed across stakeholders and internal teams

• Collaborate with Design Leads, Product Owners, Tech Leads, and Scrum Masters to guide end-to-end execution and delivery, strengthening concept readiness and artifact quality

• Consult with teams on planning design work (size, scope, sequence, next steps) so that teams understand requirements and rationale

• Track delivery across projects (small to large), serving as the single point of contact for project status & issue management to ensure milestones, status, decisions, and risks are consistently documented, communicated, and reported as needed

• Leverage traditional and AI tooling to develop on rhythms, activities, and ceremonies to improve predictability and reduce rework

• Uphold company standards and best practices and champion continuous process improvements to drive craft and design output

• Develop and maintain reusable documentation (SOPs, templates, playbooks) and support engagement/communication to sustain team health

Required qualifications, capabilities, and skills:

• 4+ years of project/ program management or design operations experience working with digital UX design teams

• Strong understanding of the product development lifecycle at scale; fluent in Agile and Waterfall delivery methodologies

• Proficient with delivery/ops tooling (e.g., Atlassian/Jira, Monday.com) and using it to drive workflow transparency and reporting

• Excellent communication skills: synthesize delivery status into clear narratives and dashboards with appropriate rigor, discretion, implications, and recommended actions

• Demonstrated ability to build plans, prioritize work, and drive execution across multiple concurrent workstreams

• Strong problem-solving skills: able to structure ambiguous situations, identify root causes, and translate insights into pragmatic solutions and recommendations

• Highly organized and proactive; able to operate independently while coordinating cross-functional teams in a fast-paced, distributed environment

• Proven cross-functional collaborator with the ability to influence outcomes without direct authority; strong active listening, stakeholder management, and sound judgment

• Adaptable and comfortable navigating change, ambiguity, and evolving priorities; passionate about customer-centric design and continuous professional growth

• Systems-minded and improvement-oriented: identifies patterns and root causes, and implements sustainable process/operating improvements

• Familiarity with design and AI-assisted tools (e.g., Figma, GitHub Copilot) and the aptitude to evaluate and integrate emerging tools

Preferred qualifications, capabilities, and skills

• Experience working with and/or supporting design systems

• Knowledge of current design industry trends and evolving best practices

• Strong facilitation skills, including workshops, decisioning, and alignment forums

• Comfortable leveraging AI tooling to improve operational efficiency, decision support, documentation, and communication (in alignment with firm policies)