Product Design Manager

Job Description

Product Design Manager College Board – Technology Location: This is a fully remote role. Candidates who live near CB offices have the option of being fully remote or hybrid (Tuesday and Wednesday in office). Type: This is a full-time position   About the Team  The Scoring & Reporting domain delivers the core scoring and score-reporting services that power all College Board assessments, including the SAT Suite, AP, and CLEP.

In addition to supporting these mission-critical pipelines, the team develops tools that help educators score free-response work at scale and gain deeper, more actionable insight into student learning. A major focus ahead is building and evolving our own large-scale free-response scoring, and incorporating AI-assistance in the process. The work spans a mix of long-established products and emerging platforms, with opportunities to modernize, streamline, and elevate the end-to-end experience for students, educators, and institutional partners. Design is a new and foundational capability in this domain.

The Product Design Manager will lead a team of 4–6 designers and establish a design practice that shapes experiences across operational scoring tools, educator-facing insights, student-facing insights, and formal score reporting to higher education and other audiences. Designers will be embedded in cross-functional teams that work closely with engineering, data science, psychometrics, and product owners, while the manager partners with other design leaders to ensure the domain’s experiences fit cohesively into College Board’s broader platform ecosystem.

This is a chance to build a team and define a design vision in a domain that touches millions of learners and to guide the evolution of products that sit at the heart of College Board’s mission.   About the Opportunity   As the Product Design Manager, you will lead and inspire a team of service and product designers at various levels (Product Designer, Senior Product Designer, and Lead Product Designer). You will be responsible for overseeing the design strategy, ensuring the delivery of high-quality design solutions, and fostering a collaborative and innovative design culture.

Your role will involve strategic thinking, team leadership, cross-functional collaboration, and hands-on design work. In this role, you will:  Team Leadership and Management (40%) Leadership: Provide direction, mentorship, and support to the product design team, fostering growth and development. Set vision and priorities for the team, track and mange progress to goals, and provide coaching and support to ensure team members meet and exceed goals, remain engaged, and contribute meaningfully to our mission Cultivate an inclusive and high achieving culture that enables all team members to live out College Board’s Operating Principles.

Bring proven leadership experience and consistently embody College Board’s Manager Expectations in your work. Team Building: Participate in hiring and onboarding activities to grow a diverse and collaborative design team.

Performance Management: Conduct regular performance reviews, set goals, and provide feedback to team members. Design Culture: Champion design excellence and contribute to the evolution of design standards and practices. Establish norms of embedded and iterative design work within teams, favoring cross-functional engagement over delivering artifacts.

Design Strategy and Execution (30%) Strategic Planning: Lead the development and execution of design strategies that align with business goals and user needs. Systems Thinking: Ensure consistency and scalability across the design team through the thoughtful application and contribution to design systems. Research Leadership: Oversee generative, formative, and evaluative research efforts to shape product vision and direction.

Design Quality: Elevate the quality of design across teams and products, ensuring adherence to accessibility standards and inclusive design practices. Artifact Governance: Ensure that design and research artifacts (such as personas, journey maps, wireframes, prototypes) are created and stored in a consistent and discoverable manner and reflect high quality standards that you help steward. Cross-Functional Collaboration (20%) Collaboration: Serve as the design point person for our cross-functional teams, aligning product, engineering, and research efforts.

Influence: Influence roadmap decisions by connecting user needs with business goals and organizational mission. Communication: Present research, concepts, and design work clearly and persuasively to peers and stakeholders. Growth and Development (10%) Thought Leadership: Contribute to the evolution of design standards, practices, and design system components.

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