Director of Design, Document Cloud

Our Company
Changing the world through digital experiences is what Adobe’s all about. We give everyone—from emerging artists to global brands—everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences! We’re passionate about empowering people to create beautiful and powerful images, videos, and apps, and transform how companies interact with customers across every screen. 
We’re on a mission to hire the very best and are committed to creating exceptional employee experiences where everyone is respected and has access to equal opportunity. We realize that new ideas can come from everywhere in the organization, and we know the next big idea could be yours!

The opportunity

Adobe Design is looking for an experienced design leader to join our Document Cloud team working on extending Adobe Acrobat features and functionalities across a multitude of surfaces and partnerships. As well as infusing key functionality from Adobe Express into Acrobat to democratize beautiful designs for the everyday knowledge worker, solopreneaur, and individual around the world.  

With more than 600 million monthly active users, Adobe Document Cloud products (which include Adobe Acrobat, Sign, and Scan, to name just a few) are ubiquitous in the lives and work of more than 600 million monthly active users. Document cloud also remains the fastest growing cloud in all of Adobe. 

Document Cloud design team has a long and rich legacy while still being recognized for innovation year after year. We were recognized for TIME’s Best Inventions of 2023 with our work in Liquid Mode. And that legacy of visionary experiences continues with, Acrobat's AI Assistant was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2024. 

You are:

An experienced leader with a proven track record of successfully managing large distributed (and global) design teams. You possess a strong business sense, display competence in driving quality experiences through your design leadership, and have a skillful approach to prioritization. You are driven by action and results, striving to deliver designs efficiently, analyze both quantitative and qualitative data, and iterate rapidly. Furthermore, you take full ownership of your responsibilities, excel in managing and mentoring others, and embody an entrepreneurial spirit that embraces learning from failures. 

In this role, you will: 

• Combine design vision and execution to achieve results. Apply critical thinking in line with organizational strategy to optimize increasing Acrobat and Express MAU while also elevating the quality of end-to-end journeys. 

• You are an empathetic leader who fosters an inclusive and empowering environment for everyone to do innovative and impactful work. 

• You will deliver products that serve a variety of personas including consumer, SMB, and Enterprise use cases. Balancing experiences that work for everyone while also designing products with purpose. 

• Mentor and develop: Offer guidance and support to your team members, help them overcome complex challenges, encourage learning and growth opportunities, and assist them in setting achievable career goals. 

• Learn and influence: Stay updated on industry and product technologies and trends. Be curious and explore methods, tools, and processes that improve and optimize how we approach editing, creation, and infusing AI value into our products. 

• Communicate Effectively: Clearly communicate design strategy and concepts to senior leadership and partners while advocating for how design decisions contribute to business success. 

• Collaborate and partner: Identify and prioritize opportunities in partnership with Product Management, Engineering, Data Science, and Research leaders. Build alignment and clarity between design and partner teams. 

What you need to succeed

• Proven experience leading and managing design teams at the Director or above level and managing managers. Your leadership will inspire the team to take action for better user and business outcomes. You will need to have excellent written, oral, presentation and storytelling skills to be successful. 

• Ideally experience merging experiences and extensibility. Focusing on integrations, partner management. Balancing feasibility and coming up with creative solutions. 

• Be a member and leader for the entire Document Cloud team. You have experience working with content strategy, research and program managers to get the best results from a highly diverse and cross-functional team within design. 

• Agility to navigate within a highly matrixed organization, working through and across multiple teams, functions, and structures. 

• Outstanding collaboration and communication skills, with experience working closely with cross-functional teams in product, engineering, marketing and more. 

• Exceptional executive presence to influence others, from senior executives/C-staff to individual Growth practitioners. 

• Ability to balance critical thinking at a high-level with providing mentorship to individual team members. Comfortable guiding your team through complex challenges and considering how organizational changes lead to positive business outcomes. 

• Extensive knowledge of user-centered design principles, standard methodologies for UX/UI, information architecture, and the capability to transform business objectives into captivating designs. 

• A history of innovative thinking and a passion for pushing design boundaries to achieve business objectives. Ability to tell compelling stories through making that drive influence and alignment. 

• To be located on a West Coast PST time zone. Required 1-2 night calls a week with our colleagues in India. Travel to San Jose and San Franciso a few times a year for planning, workshops, and connections to your team and stakeholders. 

About Adobe Design

Adobe Design creates tools that amplify the world’s ability to create and communicate. We’re a global team of designers, researchers, prototypers, content strategists, program managers, and more who work across Adobe’s three product lines: Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud.

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several  U.S. geographic markets, and we pay differently based on those defined markets. The U.S. pay range for this position is $173,300 -- $323,600 annually. Pay within this range varies by work location and may also depend on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the job location during the hiring process.

At Adobe, for sales roles starting salaries are expressed as total target compensation (TTC = base + commission), and short-term incentives are in the form of sales commission plans.  Non-sales roles starting salaries are expressed as base salary and short-term incentives are in the form of the Annual Incentive Plan (AIP).

In addition, certain roles may be eligible for long-term incentives in the form of a new hire equity award.

Adobe will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and “fair chance” ordinances.

Adobe is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and affirmative action employer. We do not discriminate based on gender, race or color, ethnicity or national origin, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other applicable characteristics protected by law. Learn more.
 

Adobe aims to make Adobe.com accessible to any and all users. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation to navigate our website or complete the application process, email [email protected] or call (408) 536-3015.

Adobe values a free and open marketplace for all employees and has policies in place to ensure that we do not enter into illegal agreements with other companies to not recruit or hire each other’s employees.