Lead Product Designer

As a Lead Product Designer, you take full design ownership of a single business unit, accountable for one thing above all: whether the user that unit serves actually adopts, engages with, and keeps coming back to what we build. You go deep on that user, their workflow, their friction, the moments where they hesitate or give up, and you design the experience that turns a capable product into one they rely on.

This is an individual contributor seat. No direct reports. Your leverage comes from how completely you understand one user, how good the experience you design for them becomes, and how well you bring the evidence of what users actually do into the room where decisions get made. You report to the VP of Product. You own the product metrics that drive the business outcome. Your Lead PM partner owns the business metrics: revenue, conversion, the unit's P& L. You own the engagement metrics that lead them: the applications started and submitted, the workflows adopted, the users who return and stay. These are the leading indicators that revenue depends on further down the funnel. If your number moves, theirs follows. That is how your performance is judged.

You do this inside a larger system. Manifest is several products becoming one connected whole, with a shared intelligence layer running underneath. Each product serves different users and has its own design system. You don't own the intelligence layer, and your product's design system is shared with the other designers who work on it, but you build on both, shape the design system with your peers, and feed back what your unit learns. Your focus is narrow by design. Your awareness of the whole is not.

The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:

Your business unit's experience and its user:

• Own the end-to-end experience for the business unit you're leading, anchored to a single question: does the user it serves engage with, adopt, and return to what we built?
• Own the engagement metrics for your unit, the leading indicators of the business outcome your Lead PM partner owns, and hold your design decisions to them.
• Hold yourself to outcomes, not output: you are measured by whether the engagement number moved, not by what you designed.

Research and validation:

• Partner with your Lead PM on discovery, and own the usability and customer evidence so every design decision traces to something real users did or said, not an assumption.
• Bring users into the process early and often: testing concepts before they're built and validating behaviour after they ship.
• Turn what you learn into a clear, written point of view the business can test and challenge.

Adoption through the experience:

• Own the path from shipped to genuinely used: onboarding, first-run, empty states, and the moment a new user first gets the value.
• Find out exactly why something isn't being used with data and with users and fix it in the experience, not just in the backlog.

Designing for AI and agentic workflows:

• Design the AI-native experience for your unit's user: what AI should do inside their daily workflow, and where it shouldn't go.
• Define the interaction model for agents when they act versus suggest, how users review, correct, and undo, and how work is handed off between human and agent.
• Design for trust and explainability, so users rely on AI output rather than second-guess it and measure whether they do.

Building on the design system:

• Build your unit's experience on its product's design system, and shape it alongside the other designers who work on it.
• Feed patterns and learnings back into the design system, and share what works with designers on other products so the portfolio compounds off your work.
• Build the product with engineering in the codebase; the handover is no longer a Figma file, so what ships across our stacks is what you designed.
• Design accessibility, privacy, consent, and regional requirements in from the start.

Stakeholders across the business:

• Earn the trust of the business leader who runs your unit, your Lead PM partner, and your design and engineering peers across the other brands, none of whom report to you, all of whom you need.
• Get the user's experience into strategic conversations as an input, explained in terms of each stakeholder's own business.
• Flag where a problem you're solving is really a shared one across the portfolio, rather than quietly solving it twice.

Design craft:

• Set the quality bar for design on your unit: interaction and visual craft, clear rationale, and decisions documented well enough that the designer who inherits the unit after you can see why they were made.
• Raise the craft of the people around you by example, not mandate.

What Success Looks Like:

• The markers below are directional. We'll calibrate the specifics for whichever unit you're leading once you're in the seat.
• In your first weeks, you will build the clearest picture anyone has of how your unit's user actually experiences the product where it serves them well, where they hesitate, and where they give up. You'll also be building from your first week: shipping small things into the codebase with your engineers, so you learn how the product gets built and shipped here. You will leave that period with a written point of view, backed by evidence, that the business can test and challenge.
• By the middle of your first year, your unit's engagement metric will be visibly moving, at least one AI-native workflow will be live and being used in the real work not demoed, and you'll have shaped at least one strategic decision with your unit's business leader through evidence of what users actually do. You'll know, with data, whether it's working.
• Over time, you design experiences users rely on rather than tolerate, built in a way that makes the whole Manifest system stronger and more coherent because your unit is plugged into it, not walled off from it. And as you move across units, that track record compounds into a kind of design judgment this ecosystem can't be run without.

Requirements:

• You have spent eight to twelve years in product design, with real depth designing for a specific user or segment rather than spreading thin across many. You know a user's workflow is something you earn an understanding of, not something you assume, and you've shipped work that measurably changed how users behave.
• You are outcome-oriented to the core. You measure yourself by whether engagement, adoption, and retention moved, not by what you delivered. When something isn't being used, your instinct is to find out exactly why with data and with users before reaching for a redesign.
• Your craft is exceptional. In interaction and visual design, information architecture, and the details that make an experience feel effortless, you hold a high bar and can explain every decision. You think in systems: you build on your product's design system, strengthen it with your peers, and know when a pattern belongs in the system versus a one-off.
• You design for AI. You've designed AI-powered or agentic experiences into real workflows, or you're moving there fast and with intent, and you understand what makes users trust, correct, and rely on AI rather than try it once. You know where AI shouldn't go. And you design with AI as a matter of course: you build in the codebase alongside engineers, using AI tooling to take your work from idea to shipped product, and you treat becoming more AI-native as part of the job, not a box you've already ticked.
• You lead without a reporting line. You can earn the trust of a business leader who runs their own P& L, bring the user's experience into their strategy, explain why in terms of their business, and come out with the relationship stronger. You know when to hold the line on craft and validation, and when to ship and learn.
• You're comfortable going narrow, owning one user's experience completely while staying fluent in the bigger system your work sits inside, and you're energised rather than unsettled by the prospect of taking that same discipline to a new unit when the business needs it. And underneath it: you remember that the user you're designing for is helping a student through one of the biggest decisions of their life.
• Most importantly, you read this, and your first reaction wasn't "this is a solid design job. It was "I want to own a user's experience completely and design the thing they can't work without. That's the person this role is for.