Staff Design Program Manager, Firefly

The opportunity

We are looking for a Staff Design Program Manager to join the Firefly Design team within Adobe Design. You will partner with leaders across Product Design for AI products and Creative Pro Design who work with globally distributed teams. Your role will complement and support the leaders for our team's overarching goals and objectives.

This is a rare opportunity to establish and lead the innovation operations practice for one of Adobe's highest-priority product organizations. Firefly sits at the intersection of generative AI and creative tools, and the design team is working in genuinely new territory.

We need someone who has established operational processes for innovative initiatives, who knows how to create conditions for early-stage creative exploration and can bring rigor and repeatability to a space that is often treated as purely intuitive.

There is no existing practice to inherit. You will build it.

What you’ll do

• Establish and lead the innovation operations practice for the Firefly Design team, including frameworks, rituals, and tools that enable consistent early-stage design exploration across a globally distributed organization
• Design and facilitate design sprints, speculative design sessions, and futures thinking workshops that help the team move from ambiguous problem spaces to actionable design directions
• Own pre-roadmap coordination by creating the operational connective tissue between research, design, and product in the space before features are formally scoped
• Build repeatable intake, scoping, and synthesis processes for 0-to-1 programs so innovation work can be tracked, evaluated, and communicated to leadership without losing its exploratory nature
• Partner with design leadership to define what innovation success looks like for Firefly, and establish the metrics and documentation practices to measure and report it
• Serve as a strategic thought partner to design leads, helping them translate early-stage creative thinking into program structures that can move through the organization
• Create alignment across design, product, engineering, and research by building shared language and process for how innovation work gets prioritized, staffed, and progressed
• Represent and advocate for the Firefly design team's innovation portfolio to senior leadership, connecting exploratory work to broader organizational goals
• Apply AI tooling to innovation workflows, from research synthesis to facilitation support to executive reporting, and help the design team build fluency in working this way
• Partner with product and engineering leadership to map the full product development lifecycle for Firefly, and identify where design innovation input is needed at each stage to influence outcomes before decisions are locked

What you need to succeed

• 12+ years of experience in design operations, program management, or innovation strategy within a design and technology environment
• Demonstrated experience building innovation operations from the ground up, not inheriting a practice, but establishing one
• Deep fluency in innovation methodologies including design sprints, speculative design, futures thinking, and rapid prototyping, with the judgment to know when each is the right tool
• Demonstrated experience navigating the tension between product maturation and ongoing innovation, helping organizations balance the demands of scale with continued evolution and growth
• Experience coordinating across globally distributed design and product teams, with strong instincts for async-first communication and cross-timezone collaboration
• Strong executive communication skills, with the ability to translate exploratory creative work into language that resonates with senior leadership without flattening its nuance
• Ability to build trust quickly with design leadership and act as a genuine thought partner, not just an operational executor
• Comfort with and curiosity about AI tools, including experience applying them to design or program management workflows
• A portfolio of innovation programs or frameworks you have built, facilitated, and iterated on over time
• Deep understanding of the product development lifecycle, including how design work moves through discovery, definition, and delivery, and where innovation processes must connect to ship-ready work without losing creative ambition
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several  U.S. geographic markets, and we pay differently based on those defined markets. The U.S. pay range for this position is $146,300 -- $277,400 annually. Pay within this range varies by work location and may also depend on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the job location during the hiring process.

At Adobe, for sales roles starting salaries are expressed as total target compensation (TTC = base + commission), and short-term incentives are in the form of sales commission plans. Non-sales roles starting salaries are expressed as base salary and short-term incentives are in the form of the Annual Incentive Plan (AIP).

In addition, certain roles may be eligible for long-term incentives in the form of a new hire equity award.

State-Specific Notices:

California:

Fair Chance Ordinances

Adobe will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and “fair chance” ordinances.

Colorado:

Application Window Notice

If this role is open to hiring in Colorado (as listed on the job posting), the application window will remain open until at least the date and time stated above in Pacific Time, in compliance with Colorado pay transparency regulations. If this role does not have Colorado listed as a hiring location, no specific application window applies, and the posting may close at any time based on hiring needs.

Massachusetts:

Massachusetts Legal Notice

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.