Team Manager, Experience Design

Pearson; Little Rock (AR); Remote; USD 175,000 - 195,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson is seeking a UX Team Manager to lead a growing design function within a multi-product learning platform. You will guide a team of UX designers across integrations and access management, balancing strategic vision with hands-on execution in a complex, systems-level domain.

You will collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Architecture to set roadmaps, coach designers, and ensure high-quality UX delivery while advancing platform-wide design standards and accessibility.

Qualifications

• 7-10+ years of professional experience in UX design, with 3+ years leading designers
• Direct experience with at least one of: identity/access management, admin/settings consoles, B2B integration setup flows, or platform configuration tools
• Service design experience, particularly mapping multi-actor journeys and touchpoints across systems
• Experience using AI-assisted design and prototyping tools to enhance workflows and AI-enabled platforms
• End-to-end UX design across complex, multi-surface products including modern and legacy systems
• Proven experience managing priorities across multiple workstreams with conflicting demands
• Comfort making decisions under ambiguity and communicating trade-offs clearly
• Collaborative leadership that builds trust across product, engineering, security, and design
• Ability to switch between hands-on design guidance and higher-level planning as needed

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of UX designers through coaching, feedback, and career guidance
• Define design strategy and quality standards for integrations, access management, and design system work, balancing hands-on design with people management
• Own UX delivery across the platform and access-management product area, ensuring quality, consistency, and predictability
• Prioritize and sequence work across multiple teams with conflicting priorities, balancing short-term execution with long-term goals
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Architecture to align roadmaps, priorities, and success metrics for integration and access-control initiatives
• Run design planning, crit, and review rituals to maintain momentum in a technically complex domain
• Unblock teams by clarifying scope and trade-offs, especially where auth protocols and permissions shape possibilities
• Reinforce design standards, accessibility, and design system adoption for admin consoles and integration setup flows

Skills

UX design leadership

Identity/access management

Service design

AI-assisted design

End-to-end UX design

Priorities management

Decision making under ambiguity

Collaborative leadership

Hands-on design guidance

Job description

Team Manager, Experience Design

Location: Hoboken - Hybrid

This role aligns to industry level titles such UX Design Manager or Senior UX Design Manager.

Role

We're looking for a UX Team Manager who will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of how our platform connects, secures, and manages access across a complex, multi-product learning ecosystem. As an inspiring leader and strategic design practitioner, you will guide a team of UX designers to deliver innovative solutions across integrations (SSO, LTI, rostering, LMS/SIS data sync) and access management (roles, entitlements, admin consoles), the structural systems that make everything else in the product trustworthy and easy to administer. This work spans multiple actors and systems, students, instructors, institutional admins, and third-party integrations, so service design thinking (mapping experiences across touchpoints, actors, and systems rather than single interfaces) is helpful.

In this role, you'll bridge strategic vision with hands-on execution, partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and other cross-functional leaders to align on priorities, advocate for design needs, and influence platform roadmaps early enough that UX is a design constraint. You will lead multiple workstreams across a complex, technically demanding product area, develop designers through coaching and feedback, and ensure your team is focused on the highest-impact work, even when that means saying no to things that don't make the cut.

What You'll Own

As a UX Team Manager, you will be accountable for both strategic leadership and delivery outcomes across multiple workstreams spanning integrations, access management, and platform design systems. You'll guide and grow a team of designers while ensuring UX work is well-prioritized, high quality, and tightly aligned with platform and integration strategy. Partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and Architecture leadership, you'll help translate vision into execution, remove obstacles, and create the conditions for designers to do their best work.

• Lead and develop a team of UX designers through coaching, feedback, and career guidance
• Define design strategy and quality standards for integrations, access management, and design system work, while balancing hands‑on design work with people management
• Own UX delivery across the platform and access‑management product area, ensuring quality, consistency, and predictability
• Prioritize and sequence work across multiple teams with genuinely conflicting priorities, balancing short‑term execution against long‑term platform and experience goals
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Architecture to align roadmaps, priorities, and success metrics for integration and access‑control initiatives
• Run design planning, crit, and review rituals that support clarity and momentum across a technically complex, systems‑level domain
• Unblock teams by resolving ambiguity, clarifying scope, and navigating trade‑offs, especially where technical constraints (auth protocols, permissions models, provisioning logic) shape what's possible
• Reinforce design standards, accessibility, and design system adoption for platform‑level patterns like admin consoles, permissions UI, and integration setup flows

About You

You are an experienced UX leader who enjoys developing people just as much as delivering great products. You bring judgment, clarity, and calm to complex problem spaces, and you're energized by helping teams do their best work. You genuinely enjoy sinking your teeth into meaty, complex problems, the kind with real technical constraints and no obvious answer, rather than looking for the easiest path through.

You bring:

• 7-10+ years of professional experience in UX design, with 3+ years leading designers
• Direct experience with at least one of: identity/access management, admin/settings consoles, B2B integration setup flows, or platform configuration tools
• Service design experience, particularly mapping multi-actor journeys and touchpoints across systems (end users, admins, and third-party integrations), is a strong plus
• Experience using AI-assisted design and prototyping tools to enhance workflows, and comfort designing for AI-driven or agentic capabilities where they intersect with platform and admin experiences
• A strong foundation in end-to-end UX design across complex, multi-surface products, including both modern and legacy systems
• Proven experience managing priorities across multiple workstreams and stakeholders with conflicting demands, and making a defensible call when not everyone can get what they want
• Confidence making decisions under ambiguity and communicating trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
• A collaborative leadership style that builds trust across product, engineering, security, and design
• The ability to switch between hands‑on design guidance and higher‑level planning as needed, operating as both a coach and a player

What You'll Get

Pearson is on a mission to build a direct, lifelong relationship with millions of learners around the world.

As the world’s leading learning company, with 18,000+ employees across 70 countries, we reach learners at critical moments of growth, through content, assessment, and digital experiences that shape education, careers, and opportunity at a global scale.

Now, Higher Education is entering its next chapter.

We’re in the midst of a deep digital and AI transformation...reimagining learning as agentic, adaptive, and human-centered. Our teams are designing intelligent learning products that don’t just deliver information, but actively coach, challenge, and partner with learners, grounded in Socratic principles, critical thinking, and pedagogical rigor.

This is a rare moment to shape the future of learning. Designers at Pearson are helping define how AI shows up in education with intention, ethics, and craft. We are creating experiences that evolve alongside tomorrow’s students, instructors, and institutions. From agentic study companions to AI-powered course creation tools, we’re building systems that amplify curiosity, agency, and impact at global scale.

If you believe great design can unlock human potential and AI should deepen learning, then this is where you can do the most meaningful work of your career. Because when learning flourishes, people do too.

Compensation at Pearson is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and specific location. As required by the California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York State, New York City, Vermont, Washington State, and Washington DC laws, the pay range for this position is as follows:

The minimum full-time salary range is between $175,000 - $195,000.

This position is eligible to participate in an annual incentive program, and information on benefits offered is here.

Applications will be accepted through 9th October. This window may be extended depending on business needs.

Who we are:

At Pearson, our purpose is simple: to help people realize the life they imagine through learning. We believe that every learning opportunity is a chance for a personal breakthrough. We are the world's lifelong learning company. For us, learning isn't just what we do. It's who we are. To learn more: We are Pearson.

Pearson is an Equal Opportunity Employer and a member of E-Verify. Employment decisions are based on qualifications, merit and business need. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status or any other group protected by law. We actively seek qualified candidates who are protected veterans and individuals with disabilities as defined under VEVRAA and Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act.

If you are an individual with a disability and are unable or limited in your ability to use or access our career site as a result of your disability, you may request reasonable accommodations by emailing [e-mail].

Job: Design

Job Family: PRODUCT

Organization: Higher Education

Schedule: FULL_TIME

Workplace Type: Remote

Req ID: 25748

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