Senior UX Design Program Manager

Summary description:

RingCentral’s UX team develops the features, interfaces, and designs that are helping redefine the way the world communicates. World-class research, design, and project management skills all help raise the technological bar, and power human connections. If you’re a talented, ambitious, creative thinker, our UX/UI team is the perfect environment to dream, produce and share your ideas with the world.

The Design Operations team at RingCentral is a fun, focused, global team made up of dynamic and diverse individuals! We are global connectors, trusted partners, and operationally strategic in our approach. We are also practical executors and problem solvers who figure out how to deliver projects efficiently and effectively in an ever-changing environment. Finally, we are passionate about design excellence and ensuring our UX teams can do the best work of their lives.

You are an experienced senior UX design program management professional with extensive experience in user experience, scaled Agile methodologies, design operations and program management best practices and tools. You will partner closely  with UX leads, interaction designers, prototypers, researchers, design technologists, and visual designers, as well as our Engineering and Product Management teams. You are a proactive self-starter with excellent design sense, communication, and interpersonal skills. You are a strategic thinker and a master executor. You have a proven track record of improving processes and creating operational efficiencies in a UX team environment. You are an organized, thoughtful person who enjoys creating order out of chaos. Your UX program management scope spans offices, time zones and hemispheres, and it's your job to keep all the players up to date on UX progress and deadlines.

Role and responsibilities:

Strategic UX program management

• Understand strategic priorities and work with design leaders and product managers to define and maintain quarterly design roadmaps and manage UX scrum processes in Jira

• Act as a bridge between UX, Engineering and Product Management teams, connecting all three groups making sure interdependencies are understood and planned for

• Drive the UX plan, define milestones, track UX deliverables, and manage UX resources

• Apply project management methods (Scrum, Kanban, Lean UX, SAFe) to your day-to-day work

• Identify team needs with regards to process, tools, documentation, and asset management; driving required changes to make sure designers are working at optimum efficiency

• Proactively creates new processes (as needed) and sunsetting old processes (we’ve outgrown)

Enable design excellence

• Collaborate with UX team leadership in key project decision-making, including requirements gathering, scheduling, resource allocation, and coordination of teams and approval processes

• Work with design team members to create and enforce UX best practices and processes

• Manage operational programs to help up-level and promote the design team presence both internally and externally

• Provide mentorship to more junior team members

Foster global culture & connections

• Responsible for communication and coordination across global offices for multiple UX product areas including portions of large cross-product initiatives

• Partner with remote teams to provide project progress reports, status reports, and risk assessment reports

• Create a culture of “one-team” in a heavily distributed workforce

Preferred qualifications:

• 8+ years of senior UX design program management experience in a medium to large UX organization working with UX Designers, Product Managers and Engineers

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills interacting at all levels of the organization

• Ability to effectively lead and manage projects involving cross-functional teams working across multiple time zones

• Deep and thorough understanding of project management methodologies including Agile

• Thorough knowledge of user-centered design processes and iterative development processes

• Extensive knowledge of project management software tools: Jira, Confluence and Google Suite

• Knowledge and familiarity of design software tools such as: DSMs, Framer, Figma, Sketch, etc.

• BA/BS/MS degree or equivalent practical experience in User Experience, Business or Operations

Bonus points:

• Experience leading projects within enterprise software development life cycle

• Background in interaction design and Design Thinking processes

• Certified ScrumMaster CSM

• CAPM or PMP certification