Group Product Design Manager, Systems

Adobe; San Francisco; On-site; VES 141,773,000 - 268,556,000; Full time

Job summary

Adobe Design Systems seeks a Group Design Manager, Systems to lead both the design side—libraries, tokens, specs, guidelines, and accessibility—and the creative-technology side—Storybook, plugins, and foundations. You’ll set strategy, grow the team, and drive adoption so the system is understood and used across the org.

You’ll work closely with product, engineering, and research to raise quality, provide design direction, and connect the team’s work to business decisions it informs.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in design, including experience leading and growing teams — ideally in design systems, platform design, or a closely related space.

Responsibilities

• Vision & strategy: Define and drive the direction for the design system across design and creative technology, and tie every initiative to the business or product decision it’s meant to inform.
• Decision quality: For every initiative, clearly articulate the audience and behavior shift you’re targeting, the user value, the assertion the work tests, the metric that will move your confidence, and the decision the work informs.
• Quality bar: Set and protect a clear standard of quality — across whether the work is useful, usable, and modern — and help the team know what level each piece of work needs to reach, from bare minimum to exceptional.
• Team leadership & building: Act as a player-coach: delegate audit, spec, and token work across the team so delivery isn’t bottlenecked on any one person, and grow designers and technologists through coaching and clear ownership.
• Execution & delivery: Own the design-to-code bridge end to end, keeping tokens, components, and specs moving cleanly from design into engineering, and holding the team to its schedules and quality.
• Adoption & advocacy: Drive adoption and education across surfaces, and make the system’s value visible to leadership through clear narratives and a regular communication cadence.
• Collaboration & influence: Partner with product management, engineering, and research on strategy, priorities, and staffing, and bring stakeholders along through high-stakes decisions.

Skills

Design leadership

Design systems

Figma

TypeScript

React

CSS

Accessibility

Token systems

Strategy & product sense

Coaching/mentoring

Tools

Storybook

Developer tools

Code editor

Job description

The opportunity

Do you see the design system as the engine that lets an entire design org move faster? In this role you’ll lead the team that turns craft into shared, reusable building blocks — the libraries, tokens, and components every other design team depends on, and the bridge that carries that work into code.

As Group Design Manager, Systems, you’ll lead both sides of the practice: the design side — component libraries, tokens, specs, guidelines, and accessibility — and the creative-technology side — Storybook, engineering handoff, plugins, and foundations. You’ll set the strategy, grow the team, and drive adoption and education so the system is understood and used across the org, not just maintained.

Working closely with product management, engineering, and research, you’ll provide design direction, raise the quality bar, and connect the team’s work to the business decisions it’s meant to inform. You’ll turn a high-craft group into a force multiplier for everyone who builds on top of the system.

What you’ll do

• Vision & strategy: Define and drive the direction for the design system across design and creative technology, and tie every initiative to the business or product decision it’s meant to inform.
• Decision quality: For every initiative, clearly articulate the audience and behavior shift you’re targeting, the user value, the assertion the work tests, the metric that will move your confidence, and the decision the work informs.
• Quality bar: Set and protect a clear standard of quality — across whether the work is useful, usable, and modern — and help the team know what level each piece of work needs to reach, from bare minimum to exceptional.
• Team leadership & building: Act as a player-coach: delegate audit, spec, and token work across the team so delivery isn’t bottlenecked on any one person, and grow designers and technologists through coaching and clear ownership.
• Execution & delivery: Own the design-to-code bridge end to end, keeping tokens, components, and specs moving cleanly from design into engineering, and holding the team to its schedules and quality.
• Adoption & advocacy: Drive adoption and education across surfaces, and make the system’s value visible to leadership through clear narratives and a regular communication cadence.
• Collaboration & influence: Partner with product management, engineering, and research on strategy, priorities, and staffing, and bring stakeholders along through high-stakes decisions.

What you’ll need to succeed

• 8+ years in design, including experience leading and growing teams — ideally in design systems, platform design, or a closely related space.
• You live at the intersection of design and code: equally comfortable in Figma and a code editor, and able to translate designs into production-quality UI — or reverse-engineer code to inform design.
• Strong front-end skills (TypeScript, React, CSS, animation) and the judgment to know what’s feasible, scalable, and performant.
• A deep eye for craft and detail — you know what it takes to get a product from 90% to 100%, and you hold a pixel-perfect quality bar across implementation and interactions.
• You think in systems and build reusable, maintainable component libraries — with tokens, variables, and accessibility baked in — that let the whole team ship faster.
• You move fast, prototyping ideas in hours rather than days to validate concepts before full build.
• You’re excited about AI and want to help define new interaction paradigms.
• Strategy and product sense: you connect design craft to measurable business and customer impact, reason in assertions, evidence, and trade‑offs, and frame problems before jumping to solutions.
• A collaborative, people-first leadership style — coaching designers and engineers, influencing senior partners with clear narratives, and creating shared ownership of outcomes.
• Nice to have: experience with developer tools or technical products, native or cross-platform UI (e.g., Electron), and an understanding of code editors and IDEs.

Why Adobe Design Systems

• Sit at the leverage point of the whole design org — your team’s work compounds across every surface.
• Shape the design-to-code foundation behind Adobe’s next-generation web experience.
• Build and grow a high-craft team with real appetite for new tools and new ways of working.

About Adobe Design

Adobe Design creates tools that amplify the world’s ability to create and communicate. We’re a global team of designers, researchers, prototypers, content strategists, program managers, and more who work across Adobe’s three product lines: Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud.

Adobe empowers everyone to create through innovative platforms and tools that unleash creativity, productivity and personalized customer experiences. Adobe’s industry-leading offerings including Adobe Acrobat Studio, Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly, Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Experience Manager, and GenStudio enable people and businesses to turn ideas into impact, powered by AI and driven by human ingenuity.

Our 30,000+ employees worldwide are creating the future and raising the bar as we drive the next decade of growth. We’re on a mission to hire the very best and believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. At Adobe, we believe that great ideas can come from anywhere in the organization. The next big idea could be yours.

About Adobe

At Adobe, we believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. Learn more about Adobe life, including our values and culture, focus on people, purpose and community, Adobe for All, comprehensive benefits programs, the stories we tell, the customers we serve, and how you can help us advance our mission of empowering everyone to create.

Adobe is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on gender, race or color, ethnicity or national origin, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. Learn more.

Adobe aims to make our Careers website and recruiting process accessible to any and all users. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation to navigate our website or complete the application process, email [e-mail].

AI Use Guidelines for Interviews:

Our interviews are designed to reflect your own skills and thinking. The use of AI or recording tools during live interviews is not permitted unless explicitly invited by the interviewer or approved in advance as part of a reasonable accommodation. If these tools are used inappropriately or in a way that misrepresents your work, your application may not move forward in the process.

At Adobe, we empower employees to innovate with AI — and we look for candidates eager to do the same. As part of the hiring experience, we provide clear guidance on where AI is encouraged during the process and where it’s restricted during live interviews. See how we think about AI in the hiring experience.

Expected Pay Range:

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several U.S. geographic markets, and we pay differently based on those defined markets. The U.S. pay range for this positionis $155,100 - $293,800 annually. Paywithin this range varies by work locationand may also depend on job‑related knowledge, skills,and experience. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the job location during the hiring process. In California, the pay range for this position is $202,900 - $293,800

At Adobe, for sales roles starting salaries are expressed as total target compensation (TTC = base + commission), and short‑term incentives are in the form of sales commission plans. Non‑sales roles starting salaries are expressed as base salary and short‑term incentives are in the form of the Annual Incentive Plan (AIP).

In addition, certain roles may be eligible for long‑term incentives in the form of a new hire equity award.

State‑Specific Notices:

California:

Fair Chance Ordinances

Adobe will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and “fair chance” ordinances.

Colorado:

Application Window Notice

If this role is open to hiring in Colorado (as listed on the job posting), the application window will remain open until at least the date and time stated above in Pacific Time, in compliance with Colorado pay transparency regulations. If this role does not have Colorado listed as a hiring location, no specific application window applies, and the posting may close at any time based on hiring needs.

Massachusetts:

Massachusetts Legal Notice:

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.