Senior Product Design Manager

Posted Jul 6

Senior Product Design Manager, Payroll Services

About Gusto

Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 300,000 businesses nationwide.

Our mission is to create a world where work empowers a better life, and it starts right here at Gusto. That’s why we’re committed to building a collaborative and inclusive workplace, both physically and virtually. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy

About the team

Product Design at Gusto is made up of over 60 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We’re a cross-functional bunch focused on Design, Research, Writing, Ops and Front-end Development who are always looking for opportunities to build understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto. We don’t care a whole lot about swim lanes and we work closely with our partners in Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to design, build and ship experiences that make a difference. We are passionate advocates for thoughtful, crafted, and inclusive experiences and we believe great design can make hard things possible, even delightful. Read more about Design at Gusto.

About the opportunity

Payroll is the beating heart of Gusto’s business. The Payroll Services team is responsible for the customer experiences and internal services that process payrolls, calculate taxes and deductions, pay and file with tax agencies, and maintain compliance on behalf of our customers.

As the senior product design manager on Payroll Services, you’ll empower a team of designers to wrangle technical and regulatory complexity into guided experiences for new and experienced employers. You'll collaborate with internal teams to enhance their processes through a service design approach and improve the internal tools they use to help customers set up and maintain their tax accounts. As a member of this product area’s cross-functional leadership team, you’ll be a key partner in leading the entire product development process from setting the long-term vision to strategic planning; all the way to launching new features and iterating on existing ones.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day

  • Empower a small team of product designers, creating the conditions for them to do work they’re proud of and that serves the needs of our customers and internal teams. 
  • Work with the other members of your leadership team to define a long-term UX vision for your product area and how it fits into Gusto’s broader vision.
  • Co-lead the definition of product strategy, roadmap, team OKRs, and project direction.
  • Work with cross-functional partners in UX Research, Data Science, Legal, Compliance, Payroll Ops, and Customer Support to understand customer problems and identify key opportunities for the customer and our business. 
  • Build our collective understanding of our customers’ payroll and tax compliance needs through research and data.
  • Design and ship both net-new and iterative projects that deliver consistent value to our customers.
  • Contribute to Gusto’s product design leadership community by sharing your skills and experience.
  • Champion our design system and platform standards, and help evolve them through your team’s work.

Here’s what we're looking for:

  • 8+ years' Product Design experience, ideally with two of those in management.
  • Breadth of impact: This role will be one of Gusto’s most senior design leaders. You should have demonstrated experience leading design direction across multiple teams, and influencing design/product across multiple product areas.
  • Comfortable with complexity: You’ve led the design of approachable, guided customer experiences in complex domains. Ideally you’ve led a platform/services or enablement team.
  • Product acumen: This role will contribute directly to business and product strategy. You should be comfortable working with executive stakeholders, and be able to demonstrate how you’ve shaped business decisions.
  • Technical acumen: This role will require a deep understanding of our technical systems and how those translate into customer and business outcomes. You’ll work directly with your engineering partners to improve the systems that power our customer experiences. You should be able to demonstrate how you’ve built your own technical understanding, and influenced system decisions that affect customer experience.
  • Builder mindset: This role will lead a team to ship customer-facing products and services, not just plans and documents. You should be able to demonstrate how you’ve stayed involved with customer-facing work as a leader, and how you’ve supported your direct reports through complex projects.
  • High quality bar: This role will be a tireless advocate for our customers’ experience with Gusto. You should be able to demonstrate how you’ve maintained design quality and accessibility across screen sizes, while shipping iteratively to deliver customer value early and often.

Our cash compensation range for this role is $174,000/yr to $235,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $204,000/yr to $254,000/yr in San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas. 

When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required.

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto. 

Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you require assistance in filling out a Gusto job application, please reach out to candidate-accommodations@gusto.com.