Product Design Manager (Developer Experience & Extensibility)

Full Time
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
5 hours ago

Get to know OktaOkta is The World’s Identity Company. We free everyone to safely use any technology, anywhere, on any device or app. Our flexible and neutral products, Okta Platform and Auth0 Platform, provide secure access, authentication, and automation, placing identity at the core of business security and growth.At Okta, we celebrate a variety of perspectives and experiences. We are not looking for someone who checks every single box - we’re looking for lifelong learners and people who can make us better with their unique experiences. Join our team! We’re building a world where Identity belongs to you.

Get to know Okta

Okta is The World’s Identity Company. We free everyone to safely use any technology—anywhere, on any device or app. Our Workforce and Customer Identity Clouds enable secure yet flexible access, authentication, and automation that transforms how people move through the digital world, putting Identity at the heart of business security and growth. 

 At Okta, we celebrate a variety of perspectives and experiences. We are not looking for someone who checks every single box - we’re looking for lifelong learners and people who can make us better with their unique experiences. 

Join our team! We’re building a world where Identity belongs to you.

 

What's the opportunity?

We’re looking for a strategic and hands-on Product Design Manager to lead our Developer Experience design team. Your mission will be to reignite developer growth and win the hearts and minds of developers everywhere. You will guide the design vision and execution for our entire developer journey, from their first interaction with our documentation and SDKs to their ongoing use of our APIs, CLI, and management dashboard. This is a pivotal role focused on abstracting away the complexities of identity and creating a cohesive, intuitive, and delightful experience that empowers developers to build, test, and deploy software with speed and confidence.

You will lead and mentor a team of talented designers and champion the principle that developers are users too, applying deep user-centered thinking to reduce friction, simplify complex workflows, and lower cognitive load. Your work will shape an ecosystem of tools, APIs, and documentation that is not just functional but also embodies our Developer Experience Principles of being Simple, Clear, Quick, and Magical.

Reporting to the Vice President of Design (Auth0), this role is a core member of our Design Leadership team. You will manage a team of designers and work in deep collaboration with partners in product management and especially engineering - including our dedicated Design Engineering team based in India. This is a highly cross-functional role, as improving the developer experience is a company-wide initiative that serves as a key competitive differentiator and a primary driver of our growth. You will be instrumental in embedding a developer-first mindset into our culture and processes.

Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Work Mode: Hybrid (2-3 days Onsite per week)

Note: This role requires in-person onboarding and travel to our Bengaluru, IN office during the first week of employment.

 

Fine print:

  • Lead, mentor, and grow a team of product designers dedicated to creating a world-class developer experience across all key touchpoints, including Discovery, Integration, Outcome, and Maintenance.
  • Drive the end-to-end design process, from mapping developer journeys and identifying friction points to rapid prototyping and testing of solutions for our docs, CLI, SDKs, and UIs.
  • Establish and enforce a universal design language to ensure a consistent, high-quality, and predictable experience across every developer touchpoint, from our marketing site to API error messages.
  • Cultivate a culture of craft and continuous improvement where "small wins" that delight developers are celebrated and UX debt is systematically addressed.
  • Be a vocal advocate for developers, using qualitative insights and quantitative data—like Customer Effort Score (CES) and Critical User Journey (CUJ) metrics—to champion investments in the developer experience.
  • Navigate a complex and evolving technical landscape with confidence, balancing the need to fix what's broken with innovating on what's next for developers in identity.

You will:

  • Own the design strategy and execution for the entire end-to-end developer journey, transforming a disjointed and inconsistent set of touchpoints into a cohesive, intuitive, and delightful experience that abstracts away the complexity of identity.
  • Champion and shape the company-wide design strategy to reignite developer growth and establish an exceptional developer experience as a primary competitive differentiator and key driver of contract wins.
  • Lead, mentor, and inspire a team of product designers to obsess over developer needs, fostering a culture of craft and delight where even "small wins" that reduce friction and address UX debt are prioritized and celebrated.
  • Partner with senior product and engineering leadership to embed a developer-first mindset into our culture, ensuring business objectives are met by systematically addressing UX debt and prioritizing experience improvements over simply shipping more features.
  • Establish and scale design processes that are optimized for reducing developer friction and cognitive load, using data to validate improvements across onboarding, activation, and ongoing usage.
  • Drive cross-functional alignment across product, engineering, marketing, and documentation to create a unified and consistent developer experience at every touchpoint, from the first visit to Auth0.com to API error messages.
  • Establish hiring plans to build a world-class developer experience design team, recruiting and developing specialized talent in areas like Technical Documentation, and Platform Experience to meet our strategic goals.
  • Champion our Developer Experience Principles throughout the design process, ensuring every API, SDK, CLI, and UI we ship is intuitive, consistent, and delivers moments of delight.
  • Grow and up-skill the design team to meet the unique demands of a developer-first product, fostering technical proficiency and deep domain expertise in identity and security.
  • Collaborate with Design leadership to define and drive the long-term vision for the Auth0 product experience, focusing on transformative improvements to product configuration, customization, integration, and management.
  • Inspire and motivate a passionate design team, creating an environment where they can do the best work of their careers by directly contributing to our mission to win the hearts and minds of developers everywhere.
  • Map the entire developer journey - from Discovery to Maintenance - to identify and resolve inconsistencies, recognizing that a seamless experience requires deep collaboration between product, documentation, and brand teams.
  • Partner with engineering and product leaders to create a balanced product vision that prioritizes both near-term 'small wins' that address immediate pain points and a long-term strategy that incorporates AI and emerging technologies to continually delight developers.
  • Serve as the voice of the developer in strategic planning, using qualitative and quantitative data to influence product strategy and ensuring your team understands the "why" behind our mission to improve the developer experience.
  • Drive the creation of design systems and operational models - including a universal design language, open-source component libraries, and a dedicated Design Engineering function - to enable all teams to deliver high-quality, consistent developer experiences at scale.

 

You may be a fit for this role if you:

Design Leadership and Strategy

  • Have a track record of leading and mentoring a team of product designers on a mission to solve complex, systemic user experience challenges, ideally including specialized roles like design systems engineers or technical documentation designers.
  • Possess 10+ years of product/UX design experience, with a significant portion focused on developer-first SaaS products, platform experiences, and solving end-to-end journey problems across multiple touch points.
  • Must have 3+ years of people management and leadership experience with a track record of success in hiring, training, and developing designers ranging from junior talent to highly experienced individual contributors.
  • Have successfully scaled design systems and operations, with proven experience establishing a universal design language to fix a disjointed and inconsistent user experience across multiple properties.
  • Can articulate and drive a clear design strategy that prioritizes developer delight and experience over features, balances fixing what's broken with long-term vision, and is grounded in both qualitative insights and quantitative metrics
  • Have a proven record of acting as a leader and influencer across product and engineering to foster a developer-first culture and embed developer experience improvements into the company's core operating model.
  • Have experience managing and inspiring a distributed design team to collaborate effectively and build experiences they are proud to ship.
  • Have developed and communicated a cohesive strategy to create a seamless end-to-end developer journey, recognizing that this requires breaking down organizational silos and ensuring all teams prioritize the broader user experience.

Industry Knowledge and Customer Focus

  • Deeply understand the developer-focused SaaS landscape, with experience designing for APIs, SDKs, CLIs, and technical documentation. You have a passion for abstracting away the complexity of identity to create simple, intuitive developer workflows.
  • Can speak fluently about the developer landscape, and articulate how a superior developer experience serves as a critical competitive differentiator. You are actively engaged with emerging trends in AI, security, and web development.
  • Demonstrate a deep empathy for the developer journey, from the initial onboarding challenges to the ongoing need for clarity, productivity, and trust.

Design Management Experience

  • Have experience directing design projects that tackle a fragmented user experience, successfully addressing issues like inconsistent patterns, poor navigability, and low feature discoverability.
  • Have a diverse design management portfolio that shows you can create a unified vision across B2B and developer-centric use cases, driving consistency from the marketing site to the management dashboard and even API error messages.
  • Have experience leading teams focused on systematically addressing UX debt and establishing frameworks like a Design Engineering function or a "Small Wins" program to create momentum and delight.

 

 

 

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What you can look forward to as a Full-Time Okta employee!

  • Amazing Benefits
  • Making Social Impact
  • Developing Talent and Fostering Connection + Community at Okta

Okta cultivates a dynamic work environment, providing the best tools, technology and benefits to empower our employees to work productively in a setting that best and uniquely suits their needs. Each organization is unique in the degree of flexibility and mobility in which they work so that all employees are enabled to be their most creative and successful versions of themselves, regardless of where they live. Find your place at Okta today! https://www.okta.com/company/careers/.Some roles may require travel to one of our office locations for in-person onboarding.

Okta is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, marital status, age, physical or mental disability, or status as a protected veteran. We also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and convictions records, consistent with applicable laws. If reasonable accommodation is needed to complete any part of the job application, interview process, or onboarding please use this Form to request an accommodation.Okta is committed to complying with applicable data privacy and security laws and regulations. For more information, please see our Personnel and Job Candidate Privacy Notice at https://www.okta.com/legal/personnel-policy/.