Design Operations Lead - Product Design

Firstminute Capital; Paris; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Mistral is seeking a Product Operations Manager (Design) to streamline the operations of the design team. You will define the operating system, cadences, rituals, and forums that keep design aligned and moving forward, reducing ad-hoc work.

You will own weekly and quarterly cadences, coordinate interlocks with Brand, Marketing, Product Design, and GTM, and build a single source of truth for design work. This is a founder-level role with AI-driven automation and a design-ops mindset.

Qualifications

• 6–10 years of experience in design operations, product operations, program management, or a chief-of-staff role within a creative or product organization.
• A founding design-ops mindset — you've built operational disciplines from scratch, not just maintained inherited ones.
• Comfortable automating with AI tools to remove repetitive overhead, while equally skilled at coordinating people and building coalitions without authority.
• Strong systems thinking — you design repeatable rhythms and processes, not just run meetings.
• Design literacy — enough background to have felt the pain designers feel and to be credible with the team.
• A make-it-happen attitude: positive, bias to action, unblocks rather than escalates.
• Excellent communication and synthesis skills — you turn scattered signals into a shared source of truth.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity and define your own scope in a role with no playbook and no team to delegate to.

Responsibilities

• Define the operating system of the design team — the cadences, forums, rituals, and source-of-truth that keep the team aligned and moving forward.
• Own the weekly and quarterly cadences, from leadership syncs and critiques to planning, retros, and headcount-cycle inputs.
• Coordinate the Brand × Marketing and Product × Product Design interlocks so design work is surfaced with enough lead time and dependencies are planned, not discovered late.
• Establish how the team tracks and shares out work — a single source of truth for status, and the forums where design is made legible to the rest of the org.
• Design and hold decision-making forums so decisions get made, recorded, and not relitigated.
• Separate ritual from overhead — keep the cadences that create alignment and cut the ones that are just tax.
• Automate repetitive coordination, reporting, and tracking with AI so the team spends time on design, not admin.
• Bring the wider Product Operations toolkit to the design team — data and analytics for transparent reporting, structured feedback loops and early-access programmes, and launch coordination that aligns design work with product release cycles and go-to-market timing.
• Partner with marketing, PMs, engineering and GTM to align design work with go-to-market timing and surface what's shipping.

Skills

Design operations

Product operations

Program management

Chief of staff mindset

Automation with AI

Systems thinking

Design literacy

Communication skills

Ambiguity management

Job description

Mistral is seeking a Product Operations Manager (Design) to streamline the operations of the design team. You will define the operating system, cadences, rituals, and forums that keep design aligned and moving forward, reducing ad-hoc work.

You will own weekly and quarterly cadences, coordinate interlocks with Brand, Marketing, Product Design, and GTM, and build a single source of truth for design work. This is a founder-level role with AI-driven automation and a design-ops mindset.