Product Design Manager - n8n

About n8n

n8n is the open workflow orchestration platform built for the new era of AI. We give technical teams the freedom of code with the speed of no-code, so they can automate faster, smarter, and without limits. Backed by a fiercely inventive community and 500+ builder-approved integrations, we’re changing the way people bring systems together and scale ideas for impact.

Since our founding in 2019, we’ve grown into a diverse team of over 260 - working across Europe and the US, connected by a shared builder spirit and with our centre of gravity in Berlin.

The Role

We're looking for an experienced design manager to lead our Product Design team.

This is a management role. Your job is to develop designers, raise the quality of the work, and make sure design has real influence on where the product goes. It is not a player-coach role, and it is not a step up for a strong IC looking for their first management position. We need someone who has already managed product designers and can do it well from day one.

n8n is a powerful, flexible technical tool, which means the problems your team tackles are complex. Design decisions have to account for diverse user workflows, technical constraints, and how changes ripple across the whole platform. You'll need enough craft depth to recognise excellent work, challenge it constructively, and help designers get better. The team needs a manager whose design judgment they trust.

You'll manage a team spanning product designers, design engineers and user researchers at a range of seniority levels, working across our product areas. You'll work alongside our other design manager. You'll report to our VP of Product until our Head of Design joins the team.

More than 80% of workflows built on n8n involve AI agents, and we're widening from a developer audience to a broader set of builders. That shift is the central design problem here, and your team is at the centre of it.

Your Main Goals

Your main goal is to build a Product Design team that consistently produces excellent work and shapes how n8n's product evolves. Here's what that involves:

Lead and develop the team

• Run regular, high-quality 1:1s and coach designers, design engineers and researchers across different levels.
• Own performance management: evidence-based reviews, honest feedback, and real support for anyone who isn't where they need to be.
• Help people understand what's expected at their level and what growth looks like, evolving our progression framework for Product Design.
• Hire excellent designers as the team grows, and broaden the range of backgrounds and perspectives on the team.

Raise the design bar

• Set and hold a high standard across problem framing, user understanding, interaction design, information architecture and visual craft.
• Facilitate design critiques and reviews that measurably improve the work, and help designers think beyond the feature in front of them.
• Develop designers' judgment and autonomy rather than becoming the final approval layer for every decision.

Own the whole product experience

• Keep a holistic view across features and product areas, identifying inconsistencies, recurring UX problems, and opportunities for more coherent patterns.
• Work with the team to address fragmentation systematically rather than feature by feature.

Make design a real partner

• Partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership so design contributes early to problem definition and product direction, not late to execution.
• Help designers influence product decisions through strong reasoning rather than positional authority.
• Improve how the team works across critique, collaboration, decision-making and knowledge sharing, introducing structure where it helps the team scale and resisting process that slows things down.

How much of this is hands-on?

This is a management role: developing designers, raising the bar, and making design count in product decisions is the job, and that's where your time goes.

You'll stay close to the craft in critiques, in reviews and in the detail of the work, and you'll occasionally pick up design work yourself. When that happens it sits outside the squads and varies with the period: an exploratory concept, a gap during someone's leave, a problem that needs a first pass. It is not a 50/50 split, and if what you want is to keep a squad's worth of delivery alongside managing the team, this isn't the role.

Requirements

Must-haves

• 👥 Proven design management: You've managed product designers in a product-led technology company for 3+ years, with a team of five or more. This is not a first management role.
• 🧭 Running a team well: You've run effective 1:1s, evidence-based performance reviews and difficult feedback conversations, including with people who weren't performing. You've built or improved a career progression framework for designers, and you're comfortable with the administrative side of managing a team rather than treating it as overhead.
• 📈 Growing people: You coach and mentor, you run critique that changes the work, and you can point to specific designers who got measurably better or grew in scope while reporting to you.
• 🎨 Design taste and judgment: Your own craft is strong enough that designers trust your read on quality, you can articulate what separates adequate design from excellent design, and you'll step into the work directly when the situation calls for it.
• 🎯 Hiring: You've hired designers consistently well, you know where good design talent is and how to attract it, and you can tell the difference quickly.
• 🤖 AI fluency: You use AI tools hands-on in your own work and in how your team designs, and you have an informed view on designing AI-enabled products. AI agents are the product here, so this one is not optional.

Nice-to-haves

• 🛠️ Technical products: You've managed design teams in B2B SaaS, developer tools, workflow automation or similarly technical products.
• 🧠 Technical mindset: You don't need to write code, but genuine curiosity about what's happening underneath (APIs, webhooks, data structures, how workflows actually execute) earns you credibility with engineers here.
• 👩‍💻 Designing for developers: You've designed products for developers, technical operators or other sophisticated users.
• 🔭 Systems view: You can step back from individual projects to spot patterns and UX problems across a broader product experience.
• 🤝 Influence without authority: You bring Product and Engineering peers with you through reasoning rather than positional authority.
• 📊 Scaling teams: You've grown a design team through a period of rapid company growth.
• 🌍 Distributed teams: You've managed designers in remote-first or highly distributed organisations.
• 🔓 Open source: You've worked on open-source or community-driven products.
• 🌱 Inclusive hiring: You've meaningfully broadened the diversity of a design team through how you hire.

Our Hiring Process

1. Screening call with our recruiter. 45 minutes, no prep.
2. Leading designers with the hiring manager, 75 minutes. You'll present for 20 minutes on a team you built, grew or turned around.
3. Live critique and coaching, 60 minutes. We'll send you a real piece of n8n design work 24 hours ahead.
4. Conversation with our VP of Product, and a culture call with Jan, our CEO. 45 minutes each.
5. Meet two or three of the designers you'd be managing. Not scored.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation 💸 – We offer fair and attractive pay.
• Ownership 💪 – You’ll get a slice of n8n with equity.
• Work/life balance 🏖️
  • Europe: 30 days of vacation, plus public holidays.
  • US: 20 vacation days, 8 sick days, plus public holidays.
• Health & wellness 🩺
  • Europe: Benefits according to local country norms.
  • US: Multiple low-premium, low-deductible medical plans with coverage for individuals and families, along with dental and vision coverage.
• Future planning 💰
  • Europe: Pension contributions according to local country norms.