Introduction
IBM Instana’s fully automated real-time observability platform puts performance data in context to deliver rapid identification to help prevent and remediate issues.
With today’s highly dynamic and complex cloud environments, the average cost of an hour of downtime can reach six figures and beyond1. Traditional application performance monitoring (APM) tools simply aren’t fast enough to keep up or thorough enough to contextualize the issues identified. Also, they are typically limited to super users who must complete months of training to learn.

IBM Instana Observability goes beyond traditional APM solutions by democratizing observability so anyone across DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, ITOps and development can get the data they want with the context they need. Instana automatically delivers continuous high-fidelity data at 1-second granularity and end-to-end traces with the context of logical and physical dependencies across mobile, web, applications and infrastructure.

Your Role and Responsibilities
We are looking for a Senior Design Manager who can guide a mixed-discipline design team and empower them to deliver exceptional end-to-end customer experiences. You’ll join the worldwide design organization for IT Automation Software at IBM.

You will manage a team that includes UX and visual design, design research, and content design. The experienced leader will mentor designers with various creative backgrounds and career experiences and set up the design team for success.

Responsibilities:

– Deliver on a customer-centered strategy by setting high-level design goals to ensure a consistent and engaging experience.
– Shape the design culture by setting a high bar for performance and design excellence, and addressing performance misalignment in a prompt and human-centered manner.
– Steward design from discovery to released product, ensuring customer insights are collected and incorporated at each stage.
– Own operational outcomes, managing project tasks and deliverables using agile methodologies.
– Drive alignment by collaborating with developers, marketers, product managers and other design teams to drive a shared understanding of users’ needs and behaviors.
– Pursue disciplined innovation, with emphasis on cross-functional collaboration, experimentation, and learning.
– Communicate, collaborate, and innovate — promoting positive cross-discipline product culture.
– Make data-driven decisions –from one source of truth– with a bias for understanding and action.
– Promote an environment of psychological safety for interpersonal risk-taking that allows the design team to spend more time towards high-performance goals.
– Review designs of the multi-skilled design teams, improving the work while growing the designers and supporting their career development.
– Foster a team culture of diversity and transparent collaboration.
– Advocate for and facilitate human-centered design in everyday work.
– As a first-line manager, you will also contribute to and own management-related initiatives for the IT Automation Product Design organization. Examples of these initiatives include metrics reporting, engagement surveys and retrospectives, and organizational planning.

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

• Significant years of experience that demonstrates strategy, leadership, and collaboration on complex problems.
• Several years experience as a design lead/people manager.
• Demonstrated evidence of managing relationships across the stakeholder spectrum (internally and externally with clients).
• Known for transformational leadership and sustained record of excellent design work and leadership.
• Experience leading teams towards the successful delivery of high-quality designs to market.
• Contributes to developing strong leadership pipeline.

Preferred Technical and Professional Expertise

• Masters in User Experience Design, Human Computer Interaction, Human Factors, Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Science or related discipline
• Experience in enterprise software design and delivery
• Portfolio of previous work in either UX, design research, or content design that demonstrates an understanding of design best practices.