Senior Manager, Product Design

At Compass, our mission is to help everyone find their place in the world. Founded in 2012, we’re revolutionizing the real estate industry with our end-to-end platform that empowers residential real estate agents to deliver exceptional service to seller and buyer clients.

Who We’re Looking For

We are seeking an experienced, strategic, and operationally rigorous Senior Design Manager to lead the product design team dedicated to our consumer experience. In this role, you will define and execute the end-to-end consumer journey across compass.com and the Compass consumer mobile app (iOS and Android), reaching millions of home browsers, buyers, and sellers.

Reporting to a Senior Director of Product Design, you will oversee a talented team of product designers while serving as a strategic peer to Engineering and Product Management leaders. You will bridge high-level vision and tactical execution—balancing world-class visual craft, user research, and interaction design with disciplined project resourcing, milestone tracking, and stakeholder management. As a Senior Design Manager, your orientation spans across (driving strategic cross-functional alignment and shared roadmaps with Consumer EPD partners), down (mentoring talent, raising the craft bar, and operationalizing delivery), and critically up - ensuring Director, VP, and executive leadership are continually aligned on design strategy, milestones, and customer outcomes. You excel in a fast-paced organization, maintaining clarity and momentum while ensuring that critical consumer initiatives are thoroughly vetted, tracked, and reviewed across all levels of leadership.

Responsibilities

• Consumer Experience Leadership (Web & Mobile): Lead the design vision and execution for consumer touchpoints, including compass.com and the Compass iOS/Android native mobile apps. Drive cohesive, modern, and high-converting discovery, search, listing exploration, and decision-making experiences across platforms.
• Upward Alignment & Executive Governance: Drive continuous, high-visibility alignment with senior leadership. Confidently interface with and present to Directors, VPs, and executive stakeholders, framing design challenges around business value and customer outcomes. Ensure executive feedback is rapidly synthesized and integrated into team priorities.
• Operational Diligence & Timeline Tracking: Drive rigorous operational discipline across all design workstreams. Proactively scope and resource projects, manage capacity, establish delivery milestones, and track project timelines in close collaboration with Product and Program Management. Ensure design commitments are met with predictability in a fast-paced, iterative environment.
• People Leadership & Coaching: Manage, coach, and inspire a team of product designers (spanning mid-level to senior/staff ICs). Conduct regular 1:1s, support career growth paths, drive performance evaluations, and foster a collaborative, psychologically safe team environment. Coach designers on leading complex projects, articulating design rationale, and managing stakeholder dynamics.
• Design Craft & Usability Standards: Champion an uncompromising bar for design quality. Conduct hands-on critiques and reviews to elevate visual finish, interaction polish, information architecture, accessibility, and overall usability across responsive web and native mobile interfaces.
• Cross-Functional Partnership : Foster high-trust, peer-level partnerships with Product Management, Engineering, and Analytics leads. Act as a facilitative leader who aligns multi-quarter roadmaps, resolves dependencies, balances technical feasibility with customer delight, and drives shared accountability for consumer KPIs.
• Systems Thinking & Multi-Platform Cohesion: Partner closely with Design Systems and Engineering teams to implement reusable component patterns and design tokens. Ensure unified brand consistency and seamless transitions between web, mobile web, and native mobile apps.
• Data-Informed & Insight-Led Discovery: Champion continuous user research and data-driven iteration. Guide your team in planning qualitative usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and quantitative metrics tracking (e.g., search conversion, engagement, retention), translating insights into actionable design iterations.
• Hiring & Design Org Culture: Identify team staffing needs, shape job requisitions, and partner with Talent Acquisition to recruit, interview, and cl…