Lead Product Designer

Manifest Global empowers in building companies that connect the world towards growth, prosperity, and innovation. Our portfolio includes trailblazer brands such as Cialfo , BridgeU , Explore , Kaaiser , EduGo , and Flow AI and which are dedicated to expanding global student mobility by serving their respective stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Our Mission
To create a world where every student, regardless of their ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic status, and learning preference, gets equal access to higher education through our world-class network of portfolio brands; a network that globally connects community stakeholders that provide the finest resources and support material, anywhere in the world and at any time.

What This Role Is

Every year, millions of students make a decision that sets the direction of their lives: where to study, what to study, and which country they will build a career in. That decision runs through a counselor's office, a university's admissions funnel, a family's conversation with an advisor, and a visa timeline — and almost none of the signal from one step reaches the next. Manifest exists to connect that journey, and it does it through products that each serve one part of it exceptionally well.

This role owns the experience of one of those parts at a time. As a Lead Product Designer, you take full design ownership of a single business unit, accountable for one thing above all: whether the user that unit serves actually adopts, engages with, and keeps coming back to what we build. You go deep on that user — their workflow, their friction, the moments where they hesitate or give up — and you design the experience that turns a capable product into one they rely on.

This is an individual contributor seat. No direct reports. Your leverage comes from how completely you understand one user, how good the experience you design for them becomes, and how well you bring the evidence of what users actually do into the room where decisions get made.

You report to the VP of Product. You own the product metrics that drive the business outcome. Your Lead PM partner owns the business metrics — revenue, conversion, the unit's P&L. You own the engagement metrics that lead them: the applications started and submitted, the workflows adopted, the users who return and stay. These are the leading indicators that revenue depends on further down the funnel. If your number moves, theirs follows. That is how your performance is judged.

You do this inside a larger system. Manifest is several products becoming one connected whole, with a shared intelligence layer running underneath. Each product serves different users and has its own design system. You don't own the intelligence layer, and your product's design system is shared with the other designers who work on it — but you build on both, shape the design system with your peers, and feed back what your unit learns. Your focus is narrow by design. Your awareness of the whole is not.

How the Role Grows

You own one business unit at a time, not one forever. As the business evolves and as you grow, you may move to a different unit — a different product, a different user, a different problem — typically on a twelve- to eighteen-month horizon. Moves are deliberate, not arbitrary: they happen when a unit reaches a stable state you've brought it to, and they're a mutual decision between you and the VP of Product, weighing what the business needs against where you want to grow. You won't be pulled off something mid-flight the moment it starts working.

It's how Manifest puts its strongest design thinking where the business needs it most, and it's how you build range: the designer who has gone deep on the counselor, then the student, then the advisor understands this ecosystem in a way almost no one else can. The constant across every rotation is the mandate — own one unit's experience completely, move the metric that shows its user is engaged, and design AI-native product that plugs into the whole.

What Makes This Role Different

Most design roles ask you to deliver screens against someone else's requirements. This one asks you to own a number — the measure of whether users actually engage — and design whatever it takes to move it, from discovery and validation through to the onboarding moment where a new user first gets it.

The opportunity is designing for AI. Across Manifest's units, AI is at the point where it stops being a feature and becomes the way the product works. That changes what design is: outputs that are non-deterministic, recommendations users have to trust, agents that act on someone's behalf. When should an agent act, and when should it suggest? How does a counselor review, correct, or undo what it did? Where does the work hand off between human and agent? These are unsolved design problems, and the person who solves them for a given user, now, sets the direction for years.

The leverage is the Manifest ecosystem. You are not designing for your user in isolation. You have a shared intelligence layer that can see across the portfolio, a design system you shape with the other designers on your product, and a company that is AI-native from first principles. That means you can design experiences for your unit that a standalone product in that space could never build.

Designing with AI is assumed, and here it means building the product with the engineers. The handover has moved from Figma into the codebase: you work in code with AI tooling, ship alongside engineering, and sit closer to the code than your PM partner does. We don't consider that a differentiator — it's how the work gets done here.

What's Hard — And Why It's Worth It

The best designers we know are drawn to the hard version of a problem, not the safe one. So here's the honest shape of it.

Delivery pressure is real. Units have commitments, engineering has capacity limits, and the business wants things live. Your job is to know when to hold the line for craft and customer validation, and when to ship, learn, and iterate — without becoming either the bottleneck or the rubber stamp. Getting that judgment right, again and again, is what separates a designer who decorates a roadmap from one who shapes it.

The business leader who runs your unit knows their market cold and has their own conviction about the strategy. UX is rarely the first voice in that room. Getting the user's experience into the strategic conversation — as an input that shapes what gets built, not a layer added after the decision — means arguing in the language of their business, with evidence of what users actually do. The moment a business leader changes direction because of what you showed them is the moment you stop being a designer who executes and become one leaders actually seek out.

And because designers rotate, you'll often inherit a unit mid-stride: someone else's design decisions, live patterns users already rely on, a roadmap already in motion. Deciding what to keep, what to fix, and what to reimagine — without breaking what users have learned or the trust of the team before you — is how you build range almost no one in this market has.

None of this is the easy version of a design job. That's exactly the point.

What You Own

Your business unit's experience and its user

- Own the end-to-end experience for the business unit you're leading, anchored to a single question: does the user it serves engage with, adopt, and return to what we built?

- Own the engagement metrics for your unit — the leading indicators of the business outcome your Lead PM partner owns — and hold your design decisions to them

- Hold yourself to outcomes, not output: you are measured by whether the engagement number moved, not by what you designed

Research and validation

- Partner with your Lead PM on discovery, and own the usability and customer evidence — so every design decision traces to something real users did or said, not an assumption

- Bring users into the process early and often: testing concepts before they're built and validating behavior after they ship

- Turn what you learn into a clear, written point of view the business can test and challenge

Adoption through the experience

- Own the path from shipped to genuinely used: onboarding, first-run, empty states, and the moment a new user first gets the value

- Find out exactly why something isn't being used — with data and with users — and fix it in the experience, not just in the backlog

Designing for AI and agentic workflows

- Design the AI-native experience for your unit's user: what AI should do inside their daily workflow, and where it shouldn't go

- Define the interaction model for agents — when they act versus suggest, how users review, correct, and undo, and how work hands off between human and agent

- Design for trust and explainability, so users rely on AI output rather than second-guess it — and measure whether they do

Building on the design system

- Build your unit's experience on its product's design system, and shape it alongside the other designers who work on it

- Feed patterns and learnings back into the design system, and share what works with designers on other products so the portfolio compounds off your work

- Build the product with engineering in the codebase — the handover is no longer a Figma file — so what ships across our stacks is what you designed

- Design accessibility, privacy, consent, and regional requirements in from the start

Stakeholders across the business

- Earn the trust of the business leader who runs your unit, your Lead PM partner, and your design and engineering peers across the other brands — none of whom report to you, all of whom you need

- Get the user's experience into strategic conversations as an input, explained in terms of each stakeholder's own business

- Flag where a problem you're solving is really a shared one across the portfolio, rather than quietly solving it twice

Design craft

- Set the quality bar for design on your unit: interaction and visual craft, clear rationale, and decisions documented well enough that the designer who inherits the unit after you can see why they were made

- Raise the craft of the people around you by example, not mandate

What Success Looks Like

The markers below are directional. We'll calibrate the specifics for whichever unit you're leading once you're in the seat.

In your first weeks, you will build the clearest picture anyone has of how your unit's user actually experiences the product — where it serves them well, where they hesitate, and where they give up. You'll also be building from your first week: shipping small things into the codebase with your engineers, so you learn how the product gets built and shipped here. You will leave that period with a written point of view, backed by evidence, that the business can test and challenge.

By the middle of your first year, your unit's engagement metric will be visibly moving, at least one AI-native workflow will be live and being used in the real work — not demoed, used — and you'll have shaped at least one strategic decision with your unit's business leader through evidence of what users actually do. You'll know, with data, whether it's working.

Over time, you design experiences users rely on rather than tolerate — built in a way that makes the whole Manifest system stronger and more coherent because your unit is plugged into it, not walled off from it. And as you move across units, that track record compounds into a kind of design judgment this ecosystem can't be run without.

What You Bring

You have spent eight to twelve years in product design, with real depth designing for a specific user or segment rather than spreading thin across many. You know a user's workflow is something you earn an understanding of, not something you assume — and you've shipped work that measurably changed how users behave.

You are outcome-oriented to the core. You measure yourself by whether engagement, adoption, and retention moved, not by what you delivered. When something isn't being used, your instinct is to find out exactly why — with data and with users — before reaching for a redesign.

Your craft is exceptional. Interaction and visual design, information architecture, and the details that make an experience feel effortless — you hold a high bar and can explain every decision. You think in systems: you build on your product's design system, strengthen it with your peers, and know when a pattern belongs in the system versus a one-off.

You design for AI. You've designed AI-powered or agentic experiences into real workflows — or you're moving there fast and with intent — and you understand what makes users trust, correct, and rely on AI rather than try it once. You know where AI shouldn't go. And you design with AI as a matter of course: you build in the codebase alongside engineers, using AI tooling to take your work from idea to shipped product, and you treat becoming more AI-native as part of the job, not a box you've already ticked.

You lead without a reporting line. You can earn the trust of a business leader who runs their own P&L, bring the user's experience into their strategy, explain why in terms of their business, and come out with the relationship stronger. You know when to hold the line on craft and validation, and when to ship and learn.

You're comfortable going narrow — owning one user's experience completely — while staying fluent in the bigger system your work sits inside, and you're energized rather than unsettled by the prospect of taking that same discipline to a new unit when the business needs it. And underneath it: you remember that the user you're designing for is helping a student through one of the biggest decisions of their life.

Most importantly, you read this and your first reaction wasn't "this is a solid design job." It was "I want to own a user's experience completely and design the thing they can't work without." That's the person this role is for.

Why Manifest

Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 150+ countries. Our portfolio spans Cialfo (AI-powered college counseling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counseling since 1997 across India and Southeast Asia), Explore (AI-powered university outreach, 1,000+ university partners), and EduGo (study abroad counseling and student placement). Together, we move talent across borders at scale. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030. We're building the operating system that changes that. $76M raised. Still early.

This seat is where that mission becomes an experience for one user at a time. The ecosystem compounds only if each unit serves its user exceptionally well and plugs into the whole. Yours is the unit — whichever one you're leading — that proves it.