Senior Design Program Manager

The Collaborative Experience Design (CxD) Studio is looking for a Senior Design Program Manager who is passionate about empowering designers to achieve more through leading design operations, cross studio communications, and process development. The CxD Studio is responsible for envisioning the future of collaboration at Microsoft through products like OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams.  

Design Program Managers at Microsoft work collaboratively with designers, researchers, content writers, product managers, and developers, leading projects throughout the planning, design, and development lifecycle to implement simple, scalable approaches that amplify our design studios efforts. 

As a member of our DesignOps team, you will contribute to our charter of better cross-product integration, stronger customer experiences, improved efficiencies at scale, and ultimately a healthy and strong design culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.  

This team supports our employees in all locations around the country. This job has the option to be remote or located in one of our hubs.  

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.  

• Partner closely with our SharePoint Design Directors, Managers, and cross-functional leaders to drive tight alignment of activities across teams through cross-functional planning, strong communication, and rigorous program management. 
• Support the Design Operations practice, including intake, prioritization, capacity planning, tooling, and process optimization. 
• Drive consistency and harmony in design team operating rhythm, including communication structures, project templates, leadership cadence, and resource utilization. 
• Establish and drive a communication strategy to keep the UX team and partner teams informed and aligned on priorities and risks. 
• Initiate and run internal initiatives that significantly improve the Design org’s operations and cross-functional ways of working. 
• Optimize interaction models between Product, Engineering, Design, Creative, and Marketing, influencing cross-functionally to identify opportunity, unlock productivity, and accelerate execution. 
• Drive continuous improvement leveraging lessons learned from teams to celebrate successes as well as identify ways to improve. 
• Identify and predict obstacles, collisions, and risk to projects across multiple teams and seek solutions to eliminate them. 
• Inspire, develop, and challenge CxD's DesignOps team, modeling excellence. 
• Compose, implement, and document comprehensive and user-friendly processes. 
• Orchestrate and build team rituals that focus on tracking progress, execution, communication across the program of work, and celebration of product milestones ensuring teams are on track, work is high quality, and designers feel recognized for their contributions.