TNQTech
Website:
tnqtech.com
Job details:
Apply: https://forms.gle/EdKUpfbxPNQsDJ9U7
Role Summary
As a Design Manager at TNQTech, you will be responsible for the people, quality, and effectiveness of a group of Product Designers. Your role is to create the conditions in which designers can consistently do their best work—by coaching the team, raising the quality bar, strengthening product thinking, and partnering closely with Product and Engineering.
This is a management-first, player-coach role. You should bring 8+ years of Product/UX Design experience, including 3+ years of formal people-management experience, and a strong foundation in hands-on product design. You will still stay close enough to the work to coach, critique, facilitate difficult problems, and help teams make better product decisions without becoming the primary designer for every project.
📍Location: Chennai (Hybrid)
About Us - TNQTech, with 28 years of experience, is a leading technology company in the STM publishing industry. We solve complex problems for scientific publishers by bringing together deep domain expertise, technology, and design. Today, our products help publishers, editors, reviewers, and operations teams work smarter through thoughtful design, automation, and AI.
Role Description
What you'll do
1.People, Product & Delivery Leadership:
- Manage, coach, and develop Product Designers across different levels through regular 1:1s, clear expectations, actionable feedback, performance conversations, and career-development planning.
- Build a team that can operate with increasing independence—help designers frame problems, make sound product decisions, navigate ambiguity, and take ownership rather than relying on the manager for every answer.
- Maintain a high bar for product thinking, interaction design, visual craft, research, and implementation quality through design critiques and timely, specific feedback.
- Partner with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, domain experts, and business stakeholders to bring user evidence and design perspective into problem framing, prioritisation, planning, and trade-off decisions.
- Strengthen user-centred decision making by helping teams plan research, usability testing, workflow analysis, and problem validation—and by making user evidence a regular input to product decisions.
- Support hiring, interviewing, onboarding, performance management, and team health as the design organisation grows.
- Work with designers and engineers to reduce gaps between design intent and implementation, improve handoff and review practices, and ensure shipped experiences meet the intended quality bar.
2.Design Practice Leadership:
- Improve the systems around the work—critique, research, documentation, design systems, design-to-development collaboration, and post-launch learning—without introducing process for process's sake.
- Help designers contribute beyond delivery by influencing product direction, challenging assumptions constructively, and connecting user needs, business goals, and technical constraints.
- Help the team use AI thoughtfully across research, exploration, documentation, prototyping, and design-to-code workflows while applying strong judgment around quality, validation, confidentiality, and when not to use AI.
What we're looking for
- 8+ years of experience in Product Design, UX Design, Interaction Design, or a related discipline, including 3+ years formally managing Product/UX Designers.
- Demonstrated ownership of people management: performance reviews, career development, feedback, mentoring, hiring, onboarding, and handling difficult performance or team situations.
- A strong foundation as a hands-on Product Designer, with the ability to assess product thinking, research, interaction design, visual craft, systems thinking, and implementation quality.
- Experience influencing cross-functional product decisions and leading designers through complex enterprise or workflow-heavy problems. Experience scaling design practices, research culture, design systems, or AI-assisted workflows is a plus.
Bonus points (Good to have)
- Experience designing enterprise SaaS products.
- Experience with dashboards, data visualization, or workflow-heavy applications.
- Familiarity with accessibility standards and inclusive design.
- Basic understanding of HTML, CSS, or frontend technologies.
- Experience contributing to or maintaining design systems.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted design workflows and prompt-driven design tools.
Click on Apply to know more.
