UX Manager

Why PlayStation?

PlayStation isn’t just the Best Place to Play — it’s also the Best Place to Work. Today, we’re recognized as a global leader in entertainment producing The PlayStation family of products and services including PlayStation5, PlayStation4, PlayStationVR, PlayStationPlus, acclaimed PlayStation software titles from PlayStation Studios, and more.

PlayStation also strives to create an inclusive environment that empowers employees and embraces diversity. We welcome and encourage everyone who has a passion and curiosity for innovation, technology, and play to explore our open positions and join our growing global team.

The PlayStation brand falls under Sony Interactive Entertainment, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation.

Manager, UX Design – Partners ( London, UK)

Department overview:

The PlayStation Partners Platform is a suite of digital tools that enable game creators to build their games for PlayStation consoles, and publish them to the PlayStation digital store and discs. Through the platform, PlayStation helps creators to publish games to the highest standards, create digital store content, access developer support, and track metrics on store sales and engagement.

Our department’s mission is to make PlayStation the best place for game creators to publish their games. We do this by working closely with game makers to understand their needs, by continually improving the support services we offer them, as well as the design, operation and performance of the Partners digital platform.

Role overview:

As a member of the Partners UX Design team, your work will shape the future of the PlayStation Partners platform, and be used by thousands of game developers and publishers the world over.

We\’re a team of professional designers, writers and researchers all working to make the PlayStation Partners Platform the most welcoming, streamlined, intuitive and well-supported place to publish games; one that fits seamlessly with how game creators work, and makes a clear difference in helping their games succeed on PlayStation.

As our team is growing, we’ve a need for an additional UX Manager to help our team stay organised and effective, to guide and coach our designers, and to help us further improve the way design is done in PlayStation Partners. In this role you’ll directly manage several UX designers, work on design ops and team strategy, and lead initiatives to continually improve design maturity, methods and process. You may occasionally also do hands-on design work.

This is a permanent role based in London, UK. Your reports will be a mixture of UK and US-based designers.

This is a hybrid role. Our team typically works at home 3-4 days per week, and in our central London office (near Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street stations), 1-2 days per week.

What you’ll be doing:

Team leadership

• Leading and mentoring a team of UX designers, fostering a collaborative, experimental and inclusive work environment where your team feel supported by their fellow designers, free to try new things and able to do their best work.
• Setting clear goals and strategic direction for your team, helping them follow a robust design process, providing constructive feedback, assisting when they need help, and evaluating performance to ensure the team’s success.
• Promoting continuous learning and growth within the team by organising training, knowledge-sharing sessions, design crits, exchanges with other design teams and open sharing of work in progress.
• Ensuring your team’s wellbeing, work/life balance and enjoyment in their work. Being a manager they know they can count on to listen, support and give them the help they need.

Design operations

• Using your strong understanding and experience of good design practice to define approaches and processes for UX Design that help your team work efficiently and deliver exceptional, insightful designs. Introducing and sharing new techniques, tools and approaches that expand your team’s confidence and skillset.
• Planning, estimating and prioritising work to ensure appropriate resourcing. Co’ordinating with colleagues in product and engineering to ensure UX design is appropriately planned, considered and understood.
• Providing accountability for good UX design quality and execution across projects and teams we work with. Liaising with other designers and managers to standardise and ensure consistency across experiences.

Design strategy

• Working closely with design leadership and product managers to help define UX design strategy, goals, and KPIs aligned with business objectives
• Helping to define a practical path towards advanced design maturity in PlayStation Partners. Help your team to continually improve ways of working, increase empathy with and exposure to users, trial new techniques and methods, and always be pushing for better design with colleagues and stakeholders.
• Driving the development, adoption and continued refinement of user archetypes, service blueprints, heuristics and other shared resources that your team can rely upon to help ensure user-centric approaches and standardised approaches across projects.

Design advocacy

• Advocating for user-centric design principles, capabilities and best practices within the organisation, and educating those less familiar with design on what we bring to the table, how we solve people’s problems and how to work with us.
• Raising our team’s visibility across the organisation, increasing our collaboration with other design and research teams, and building awareness and trust with other departments.

Who we’re looking for:

• 2+ years experience in UX management, leading and developing teams of UX designers and researchers.
• 5+ years of commercial experience as an UX/Digital Product Designer, with demonstrable experience working on Enterprise /B2B software products.
• Experience working with ambiguity, proactively setting clear strategic direction and goals for design. The ability to set an exceptional, inspiring vision for design work that pushes teams to deliver better,, and helping multiple designers across multiple teams to follow that strategy.
• Proven track record in leading software product teams through a robust research and design process and successfully launching products or services. Experience working with product managers, software engineers and business stakeholders or clients.
• Proven experience in raising design maturity across organisations, having proactively made a clear difference to ways of working, empathy with users and company culture.
• Strong knowledge of design operations practices, including design systems, mapping techniques, and design workflow optimization
• Broad proficiency in service design and user experience design methods with strong skills, as well as some proficiency and experience with user research.
• Excellent project management skills, with the ability to prioritise tasks, meet deadlines, and manage multiple projects simultaneously, comfortably dealing with change and ambiguity.
• Exceptional communication and presentation skills, with the ability to effectively articulate design strategy, process and rationale for design decisions to different audiences such as product, engineering, support and senior leadership.
• Excellent workshop planning and facilitation skills.

Equal Opportunity Statement:

Sony is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All persons will receive consideration for employment without regard to gender (including gender identity, gender expression and gender reassignment), race (including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin), religion or belief, marital or civil partnership status, disability, age, sexual orientation, pregnancy, maternity or parental status, trade union membership or membership in any other legally protected category.

We strive to create an inclusive environment, empower employees and embrace diversity. We encourage everyone to respond.

PlayStation is a Fair Chance employer and qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered for employment.

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