Senior Design Manager - Core Experiences

When Apple developed the original Macintosh, the team wasn’t simply designing a new computer. They were establishing a new vocabulary for interacting with one: windows, menus, icons, pointing, dragging, selecting. Many of those ideas existed elsewhere, but the achievement was turning them into a coherent language that people could understand and carry from one application to another. We’re at another interesting moment in the evolution of interfaces. Software can increasingly understand intent, converse, adapt, anticipate, and act on someone’s behalf. That creates an opportunity to reconsider some of the assumptions that have defined product design for decades. At Mercury, we want to do more than add AI to interfaces designed for another era. We want to thoughtfully evolve how Mercury feels to use, creating experiences that are intelligent without being inscrutable, proactive without being intrusive, and distinctly Mercury. You’ll lead the product designers responsible for some of Mercury’s core experiences and establish a point of view for how our interfaces should evolve as the possibilities of software change. You’ll work closely with Product, Engineering, and Design Systems to turn emerging interaction ideas into coherent, reusable patterns, while building a team known for exceptional product thinking and craft. Our design organization consists of 40+ people who love solving complex problems through design and are equally passionate about cultivating, guiding, and inspiring one another. Key Responsibilities: • Define and evolve Mercury’s interaction philosophy, with a particular focus on how AI-native, conversational, adaptive, and proactive experiences should work across our products • Set an exceptional bar for product quality across the Interfaces organization, helping teams like mobile, dashboard and our agentic product understand not only whether an experience works, but why it feels right • Lead, coach, and develop a team of product designers, creating an environment where designers can take creative risks, develop strong points of view, and consistently produce exceptional work • Shape product strategy alongside Product and Engineering rather than waiting for requirements to arrive. Bring design into ambiguous problems early and help teams identify the right problems to solve • Stay close to the work. Use critique, prototyping, exploration, and hands-on collaboration to push ideas further and help teams turn ambitious concepts into thoughtful, pragmatic experiences • Help raise the craft and product-thinking bar of Mercury’s broader Design organization, sharing frameworks, perspectives, and emerging ideas that make everyone around you a stronger designer You should: • Have exceptional product taste: You have unusually strong judgment about how great software should behave and feel. You can move beyond subjective critique to articulate why an interaction works, where it falls short, and how to make it substantially better. You bring strong visual and interaction design fundamentals and inspire a higher standard of craft in others • Have a strong point of view on AI-native interfaces: You think deeply about how AI is changing the relationship between people and software. You’re actively experimenting with conversational, adaptive, intelligent, and proactive interaction models and have opinions about where these patterns create genuine value and where they don’t. You don’t need to have spent your career building AI products, but you should be intensely curious about what comes next • Be a craft-obsessed design leader: You’ve successfully led and developed product designers without becoming distant from the work. You know how to recognize what makes individual designers exceptional, give clear and thoughtful