Director, Experience Design – COS

Job Title: Director, Experience Design – Chief of Staff

Meet the Team:

Reporting into the Chief Design Officer, the Director, Experience Design – Chief of Staff partners with the CDO to drive processes and programs that create connection to the holistic design strategy for PayPal. We’re looking for a highly driven, self-motivated individual to work directly with our Chief Design Officer and her leadership team to drive key strategic initiatives and outcomes across the Experience Design organization.

Your Way to Impact:

The Chief of Staff will extend the reach of Design Leadership by owning special projects end-to-end. This role is a key enabler of the design strategy and is the connection point between the enterprise planning team, embedded segment business operations teams, design operations, and the finance organization. The individual in this role will collaborate with the CDO and her staff to continue to evolve our strategy and will partner in articulating the unified outcomes needed for the teams. 

The Chief of Staff (CoS) will have an immediate impact on the leadership team’s productivity, streamlining strategic initiatives, overseeing executive program management, and communicating objectives within the Design Team and between departments across the company. 

Your Day to Day:

• Identify and take on ad-hoc strategic projects; drive and monitor OKRs and closing the gaps in business and operations. 
• Develop a strategy and execute on how the Design team connects and creates transparency across the team, including things like Design All Hands. 
• Work with the CDO to identify the highest priority workstreams and help to identify who should lead the workstream, creating consistency in the way we track progress across workstreams. 
• Drive alignment around setting strategy, forming a plan with clear goals and asks, and executing and monitoring progress. 
• Build a thorough understanding of design, ops, and strategic needs of the company. Based on this, drive the priorities of the Experience Design Leadership Team through weekly meetings, shaping offsites, and identifying opportunities to increase leadership team effectiveness. 
• Communicate priorities, activities, and results to the larger organization, while ensuring deliverables are met. Have a strong pulse and feedback loop on organizational needs. 
• Help facilitate internal communications, both within the Experience Design org and the broader PayPal organization. 
• Collaborate effectively with cross-departmental executives and staff to execute on key deliverables, initiatives, or to drive alignment across teams and business units.  
• Participate in the development and synthesis of organizational strategy to achieve OKRs/metrics; assist in creating and evolving mission-vision-strategy-goals of the XD organization. 
• Evangelize alignment, adoption, and commitment to design direction and strategy; ensure that planning and execution are tied to business and design strategy. 
• Lead the development of presentations for design reviews and employee meetings. 
• Orchestrate communication streams across various leaders, ensuring the leadership team appears as “one unified voice” to the organization. 
• Bring in external POV on business matters / business practices. Develop a network of business peers on behalf of the leadership team. Link cross-functional teams together to operate with a one-team mentality. 
• Orchestrate forums /cadences / practices to ensure leadership team is aligned on business matters; provides frameworks and tools across peer leaders to ensure organizational issues and risks are swiftly and openly addressed. 
• Measure health of Experience Design organization and drive improvement plans to achieve targeted metrics. 

What You Need to Bring:

• A successful candidate should have at least 8-10+ years of experience supporting large design organizations in a COS, executive admin, design ops, or strategic support role.
• High attention to detail, even under urgent or high-pressure circumstances. 
• Ability to be a change agent in a dynamic environment. 
• Good understanding of design process and design disciplines. 
• Candidates should be entrepreneurial, with high tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, and efficient with limited resources. 
• A good sounding board for others, with low ego, and ability to anticipate the needs of a busy executive and their direct staff. 
• Finance or FinTech experience is a plus. 

We know the confidence gap and imposter syndrome can get in the way of meeting spectacular candidates. Please don't hesitate to apply.