Senior Manager, Product Design

Job description

The Senior Manager, Product Design will lead product and UX design across a distinctive portfolio of guest-facing, restaurant-facing, and enterprise experiences for Arby's, Baskin-Robbins, Buffalo Wild Wings, Dunkin', Jimmy John's, and SONIC Drive-In. We are looking for a versatile design leader to lead an assigned portfolio and a distributed team of Product and UX Designers within the broader UX Design & Research organization. The team supports experiences across app, web, kiosk, and internal tools for customers, franchisees, restaurant team members, and brands. This is a player-coach role combining people leadership, portfolio direction, and selective hands-on design involvement. You will help teams frame the right problems, make informed decisions, raise design quality, and deliver coherent, accessible experiences across connected products and platforms. You will partner closely with Product, Research, Engineering, Analytics, Operations, Brand, and enabling functions. You will also help the team evolve its practices, make thoughtful use of AI, and connect design decisions to customer, operational, product, and business outcomes. *This role is based at the Atlanta Support Center and aligns with our In Good Company policy which requires being onsite 4 days per week, typically Monday- Thursday. This position re ports to the Senior Director of UX Design & Research. RESPONSIBILITIES Lead product and UX design across assigned product areas or value streams, aligning teams around shared customer, employee, franchisee, product, operational, and business outcomes. Shape experience and product direction with cross-functional partners by framing opportunities, challenging assumptions, translating evidence into recommendations, and influencing roadmaps and investment decisions. Manage, coach, and develop a distributed and matrixed team of designers, including employees and contractors, through clear expectations, candid feedback, career development, and meaningful delegation. Serve as a player-coach, prioritizing people and portfolio leadership while contributing directly when senior design expertise will materially improve a priority outcome, resolve ambiguity, or address a critical capacity gap. Establish clear portfolio and delivery plans, including outcomes, priorities, ownership, milestones, dependencies, capacity, risks, decisions, and success measures. Maintain transparent visibility, surface risks early, and recommend practical trade-offs when scope, timing, quality, or available capacity are in conflict. Raise the quality and consistency of design work by enabling effective critique and review practices and ensuring Design remains engaged through refinement, delivery, launch, and continuous improvement. Partner with UX Research and Analytics to identify the evidence needed for decisions and translate findings into clear design implications, recommendations, and follow-up actions. Promote consistent adoption of enterprise design systems, shared patterns, accessibility practices, content standards, and design documentation within assigned value streams. Strengthen team capability through coaching, role clarity, career development, shared standards, learning, and continuous improvement of design practices. Advance the responsible use of AI across design by identifying high-value opportunities, evaluating impact on quality and efficiency, and helping the team adopt effective practices without outsourcing customer understanding, design judgment, or accountability. Manage external design resources and contribute to staffing forecasts, estimates, budget inputs, and continuity plans for assigned work. EDUCATION & EXPERIENCE QUALIFICATIONS Minimum: 4 yr degree 10+ years of experience in product design, UX design, interaction design, service design, or a related field, including at least 3 years leading people and complex digital product or experience programs. Experience leading design across multiple product areas or value streams in a matrixed product and technology organization. Demonstrated success developing designers, influencing cross-functional leaders, and balancing customer needs, business goals, delivery realities, and design quality. A strong portfolio or body of work showing product and UX design leadership, current craft judgment, evidence-informed decision-making, and thoughtful application of AI within design work or product experiences. REQUIRED KNOWLEDGE SKILLS & ABILITIES People and talent leadership, including coaching, performance management, development planning, and succession support. Product and portfolio thinking, with the judgment to prioritize, make trade-offs, and connect design direction to measurable outcomes. Deep product and UX design expertise across interaction, information architecture, prototyping, design systems, accessibility, and design-to-development collaboration. Strong research and analytics literacy and the ability to distinguish evidence from assumptions requiring further investigation. Clear communication, facilitation, negotiation, and executive influence across technical, operational, brand, and business audiences. Practical fluency with generative and agentic AI concepts relevant to design, including appropriate use cases, output evaluation, limitations, risk, and human oversight. Working fluency with modern design, collaboration, planning, delivery, analytics, and AI-enabled productivity tools. PREFERRED EXPERIENCE Experience in restaurant, retail, franchise, hospitality, or other multi-brand and omnichannel environments. Experience with guest-facing digital products, kiosks, internal or enterprise tools, and operational workflows. Experience managing contractors, agencies, vendors, estimates, or budget inputs in a large enterprise. Why this role matters This leader will help a talented design team work with greater clarity, quality, and influence across a diverse portfolio while evolving how Design creates value through evidence, accessibility, strong partnership, and responsible AI. Inspire is a multi-brand restaurant company whose portfolio includes more than 33,300 Arby’s, Baskin-Robbins, Buffalo Wild Wings, Dunkin’, Jimmy John’s, and SONIC restaurants worldwide. We’re made up of some of the world’s most iconic restaurant brands, but we’re much more than just a restaurant company. We’re a team of hundreds of thousands who individually and collectively are changing the way people eat, drink, and gather around the table. We know that food is much more than a staple—it’s an experience. At Inspire, that’s our purpose: to ignite and nourish flavorful experiences.