VP, Product Design

Workday • Pleasanton, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a high-caliber, problem-solving leader to serve as the portfolio experience partner for our core enterprise product suite. Your mission is to accelerate adoption and growth through design-led strategy, visionary exploration, and elevated UX maturity. You will deliver unparalleled value to our customers by reducing friction and ensuring our products lead to faster, better outcomes. We seek a strategic leader who will lead a high-performing design organization accountable for the intersection of traditional, deep application workflows and emerging agentic capabilities, ensuring every experience is built for excellence, speed, and measurable impact.

Requirements

• Scale and Complexity : 10+ years of leadership experience in a multi-domain enterprise environment (e.g., Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Microsoft). You have a proven track record of managing managers and navigating high-stakes product portfolios.
• Multimodal Problem Solver : A passion for solving difficult product, design, and operational problems across various form factors (Desktop, Mobile, etc.). You thrive when untangling complex logic and turning it into simple user outcomes.
• Business and Financial Acumen : You speak the language of GMs. You understand how design decisions impact conversion, retention, and growth, and you can defend design investments in terms of business value and P&L impact.
• Strategic Relationship Building : A proven history of building cross-functional alliances that go beyond the "triad." You value the input of Marketing, Research, and Analytics as much as Engineering and Product to achieve strategic excellence.
• Systems Thinking : Ability to lead within a federated design model, ensuring team contributions strengthen the central design system while maintaining high velocity for specific product use cases. You are able to lead from a view of the whole while recognizing the power of the parts.

Nice To Haves

• Innovation Resilience (Nice to Have) : Experience shipping AI-driven features is a plus, but more important is the ability to apply design rigors to emerging technologies to ensure they solve real-world enterprise problems rather than adding noise.

Responsibilities

• Portfolio Experience Partnership: Serve as the primary partner to Group GMs to identify experience opportunities that drive adoption, retention, and market expansion. You will translate complex business strategies into a cohesive experience direction, ensuring product roadmaps account for design excellence and user-centric KPIs.
• Workflow Optimization and Friction Reduction : Relentlessly audit and improve existing enterprise experiences. You are responsible for identifying high-friction touchpoints and streamlining them into elegant, usable workflows that deliver faster, better outcomes.
• Growth and Innovation Leadership : Lead design-led explorations that define future product categories and growth initiatives. You will be responsible for ensuring that innovation work informs our platform systems and long-term experience strategy, influencing the design-led innovations that land on our product roadmaps.
• Agentic and Deep Workflow Integration : Provide the architectural leadership required to design experiences where autonomous agents co-exist seamlessly with deep, complex application workflows. You will define how the system transitions between human-led and AI-assisted tasks without breaking the user's mental model.
• UX Maturity and Accountability: Raise the experience bar across product teams by modeling strong design leadership and decision-making. You will drive consistent experience ownership across the portfolio and hold the authority to escalate experience risks that impact customer satisfaction.
• Platform System Contribution and Governance : Ensure 100% adoption of our platform-level design system across the enterprise suite. You are accountable for ensuring your team's real-world product use cases inform the expansion of the system, contributing a robust library of patterns specifically for human-to-agent hand-offs and collaborative intelligence.
• Data-Informed Strategic Excellence : Partner closely with our Analytics and Research teams to ensure all product and design investments are deeply informed by user data. You will be responsible for measuring improvements and proving the ROI of design through outcome-based metrics.
• Cross-Organizational Leadership : Build deep, trust-based relationships across Marketing, Research, Analytics, Engineering, and Product. You will lead through influence to ensure a unified product voice and strategic alignment across the entire organization.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: No Education Listed