Product Design Manager, Design Systems

VLEX NETWORKS; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Clio, a global leader in legal AI technology, is hiring a Product Design Manager to lead Design Systems. The role supports teams across Canada (excluding Quebec) and the US, with in-office days in hubs like Toronto.

You’ll own the system’s operating model, governance, token architecture and cross‑platform patterns to deliver coherent brand experiences. You’ll also drive onboarding and growth patterns, collaborate with Platform Engineering on APIs, and guide a hands‑on, player‑coach leadership

Qualifications

• Design systems experience preferred.
• Leadership of design teams advantageous.
• Cross-functional collaboration with product, engineering and brand.

Responsibilities

• Own the design system operating model, roadmap, intake rules, versioning and health metrics.
• Lead the move from a design library to a source of truth used by people and agents, with tokens and component specs linked to code.
• Define AI-native platform patterns and work with teams to unify data visualization and conversational UI foundations.
• Extend system governance across web, mobile and desktop apps to ensure coherent brand and behavior.
• Collaborate with Brand, Marketing and Engineering on theming, tokens, and platform parity.
• Prototype and review token pipelines, component APIs in collaboration with Platform Engineering.
• Oversee onboarding and PLG patterns to enable growth experiments across teams.
• Align roadmaps with WCAG, VPAT, and international launches while ensuring customer-centered discovery.
• Lead, coach and grow the Design Systems and PLG design team.

Job description

Clio is the global leader in legal AI technology, empowering legal professionals and law firms of every size to work smarter, faster, and more securely.

We are transforming the legal experience for all by bettering the lives of legal professionals while increasing access to justice.

Summary:

We're hiring a Product Design Manager to lead Design Systems at Clio. The role is open to candidates across Canada (excluding Quebec) and the US. If you are located near one of our hubs (Burnaby, Calgary or Toronto), you'll be expected to be in the office at least twice a week on our Anchor Days.

About the role

Design work at Clio isn't done only by designers anymore. Product managers, engineers and agents build UI too. Clio AI formulates answers, artifacts, and automations that support workflows and work outputs through plain language requests. Our teams actively prototype in Claude to optimize, iterate, and innovate. Each of these can only produce on‑brand, accessible, consistent UI if the design system is written in a form both people and machines can read and interpret well.

As Product Design Manager, Design Systems, you'll lead the team that makes this happen. You'll steer the system's operating model: roadmap, intake, contribution, governance, versioning, and how we measure the system's health across channels. You'll also oversee the onboarding and product‑led growth (PLG) patterns that let teams run growth and retention experiments independently.

This is a hands‑on, player‑coach leadership role. You'll be as comfortable reviewing token architecture and component APIs with Platform Engineering as you are discussing brand expression and copywriting with Brand Marketing. You'll lead the team, and you'll also do the work yourself when it matters most.

You'll report to the Platform Product Design Director, and manage a team of Design Systems and PLG designers.

What you’ll do:

• Operating model and governance: Own how the system runs. That covers the roadmap, intake, contribution and review rules, versioning, and health metrics (adoption, coverage, accessibility conformance, and how consistent agent‑generated UI is).
• Agentic‑ready foundations: Lead the move from a library people browse to a source of truth that people and agents both use. Tokens, component specs, usage rules and content guidelines are stored as structured data linked to code.
• AI‑native and platform patterns: Work with design teams across Grow, Manage, Work and Enterprise to bring the interaction models and patterns they share into the system, and give them a common foundation for data visualization and charting so customers can focus on insights, not on decoding charts. Also, guide the team on conversational UI, streaming and confidence states, citations, and automation messages (what ran, what needs approval, what failed).
• Multi‑platform system: Extend the system and its governance across Clio's web, mobile, and desktop apps. Shared tokens and foundations flow to every platform, and you'll partner with app teams who build each platform's layer on top of them. The goal is coherence in brand and behaviours, not identical experiences: each platform keeps the interactions its users expect, and customers move between channels without losing their place.
• Theming and brand: Work with Brand and Marketing on how the system expresses Clio's brand. That includes theming that supports Enterprise white‑label experiences, consumer and client portals and experiences, and lets Marketing reuse the system.
• Hands‑on with Platform Engineering: Work directly with front‑end platform and DS engineering on token pipelines, component APIs and design‑code parity. You should be able to read a pull request, prototype in code, and make technical trade‑offs together with engineers.
• Onboarding and PLG patterns: Oversee a reusable set of onboarding, trial, upgrade and contextual‑growth patterns that product teams can test on their own. Partner with PLG/Growth leads so the system speeds up experiments instead of slowing them down.
• Roadmap alignment: Line up the system roadmap with Accessibility Conformance (WCAG 2.1 AA, VPAT, Section 508), international launches (France, Italy, Quebec, Spain), SMB, MM, and Enterprise timelines.
• A customer‑centric practice: Build discovery and validation into how patterns get made. That means validating with internal users (designers, engineers and agents) and with customers and consumers, and tracking how patterns perform in production.
• Team leadership and coaching: Hire, coach and grow your team through clear expectations, feedback on craft and behaviour, and career development. Run critiques, design reviews and discovery workshops that keep quality high and de