Senior Design Project Manager in Manchester

A great opportunity for a Senior Design Project Manager to sit at the heart of a growing global creative function, acting as the bridge between marketing stakeholders and the creative team. This is primarily a project management role, but with a strong relationship-management element: you'll become the trusted partner for a defined group of stakeholders, helping them shape what they need before it reaches the creative team.

The environment moves at pace, with a mixture of larger campaigns and multiple smaller, fast-moving projects running simultaneously. You'll need to be highly organised, calm under pressure and confident enough to challenge when a brief isn't ready or a request isn't quite right, rather than simply passing it on and managing the consequences later. The opportunity is particularly suited to someone who enjoys being proactive rather than reactive.

You'll build genuine relationships with your stakeholder groups, understand their priorities and areas of marketing, and become someone they come to early for advice. You'll need enough creative understanding to translate between marketers and creatives, know what information is missing from a brief and understand when to bring in senior creative leadership.

What they need –

• A project manager who can own both delivery and relationships. You'll manage projects from initial scoping through to delivery, while becoming a trusted day-to-day partner for a defined group of stakeholders across the business.
• Someone proactive rather than purely brief-led, you'll want to understand what's coming down the line, have regular conversations with stakeholders and help shape requirements before they formally reach the creative team.
• A strong bridge between marketing and creative - you'll be comfortable translating business and marketing objectives into something creatives can work with, while equally being able to explain creative considerations back to stakeholders.
• As someone confident enough to challenge, you'll be able to recognise when a brief isn't sufficiently developed, ask the right questions and push back constructively rather than simply passing incomplete work into the studio.
• A calm, highly organised operator - you'll be comfortable managing BAU alongside larger campaigns, juggling multiple priorities and working closely with creative operations and traffic to identify resourcing pressures, dependencies and potential issues early.

What you're great at –

• Creative project management – you'll have experience managing projects within an agency, studio or in-house creative environment, ideally where you're used to working at pace across multiple concurrent deliverables.
• Stakeholder relationship management - you'll build trust quickly and be comfortable developing genuine relationships with marketing stakeholders, understanding their objectives rather than simply managing their requests.
• Briefing and scoping - you'll know how to dissect a brief, identify what's missing and ask the questions needed to turn a vague request into something the creative team can do great work against.
• Organisation and prioritisation - you'll be excellent at keeping multiple projects, timelines, reviews and approvals moving, while spotting risks and changing priorities before they become problems.
• Creative and workflow understanding - you'll have enough understanding of the creative process to work credibly with designers and creative leadership, alongside confidence using project/workflow management tools and curiosity about AI-supported ways of working.

What you'll get –

Manchester-based, with a hybrid working model expected to be around 2–3 days in the office, with the wider creative team distributed internationally. A role with genuine ownership of both project delivery and stakeholder relationships, rather than being purely focused on tracking projects once a brief arrives.