Design Manager - Jira Frontier

📍 Job Overview

Job Title: Design Manager - Jira Frontier

Company: Atlassian

Location: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (Remote, Eastern Australian Time Zone required)

Job Type: Full-time (OTHER)

Category: Design Management / Product Design Operations

Date Posted: October 1, 2025

Experience Level: 5-10 Years

Remote Status: Fully Remote

🚀 Role Summary

• Lead and mentor a team of Product and Content Designers focused on enhancing Jira's collaboration capabilities within the Frontier team.

• Drive the strategic direction and day-to-day execution of design initiatives for Jira Frontier, translating high-level strategy into actionable priorities.

• Foster a culture of user-centered design, systems thinking, and high-quality craft across the design team, ensuring scalable and impactful design solutions.

• Collaborate closely with Product and Engineering leadership to align priorities, influence product strategy, and ensure design's contribution to business and user outcomes.

• Act as a key member of the leadership team, guiding project planning, prioritization, and the delivery of complex, enterprise-grade software experiences.

📝 Enhancement Note: This role is positioned within Atlassian's "Jira Frontier" initiative, suggesting a focus on innovation, expansion, and potentially new product development or significant feature enhancements for Jira. The emphasis on "improving collaboration" and "driving expansion for Jira" indicates a strategic, high-impact design management role. The requirement for candidates to be in the Eastern Australian Time Zone for this remote position highlights Atlassian's commitment to effective distributed team collaboration within specific geographical constraints.

📈 Primary Responsibilities

• Team Leadership & Development: Hire, coach, and grow a diverse team of product and content designers, supporting their individual development, career progression, and daily effectiveness. Inspire and empower the team to deliver high-impact work.

• Strategic Design Direction: Partner with Product and Engineering managers to shape the overall direction of Jira, align priorities, and ensure design initiatives are driving towards high-impact outcomes that benefit both users and the business.

• Design Execution & Quality: Guide the team in delivering high-quality design work from initial concept and framing through detailed execution, ensuring solutions are user-centered, technically grounded, scalable, and uphold a high bar for craft and interaction patterns.

• Project Planning & Prioritization: Oversee project planning and prioritization across multiple workstreams. Help the team focus on the most critical problems, navigate complexity with clarity, and manage their capacity effectively.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Build and maintain strong cross-functional relationships with Product, Engineering, Marketing, and other stakeholders. Develop a deep technical understanding to facilitate effective design and communication.

• Communication & Advocacy: Clearly and consistently communicate the team’s work, progress, context, and outcomes to design leadership, cross-functional peers, and executive stakeholders. Advocate for user needs and strategic design investments.

• Opportunity Identification: Coach the team to identify and elevate new opportunities through research, product data, and user insights, fostering strong problem framing skills.

• Craft & Systems Thinking: Provide clear, actionable feedback on design direction, interaction patterns, and system-level thinking, ensuring a cohesive and scalable design system.

📝 Enhancement Note: The responsibilities emphasize a blend of people leadership, strategic influence, and hands-on design guidance. The focus on "enterprise-grade environments," "millions of users," and "multi-product platform" implies a need for robust, scalable design thinking and a deep understanding of complex software systems. The explicit mention of "inspiring, not just directing" highlights a leadership philosophy focused on empowering and motivating the design team.

🎓 Skills & Qualifications

Education: While not explicitly stated, a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Design, HCI, Computer Science, or a related field is typically expected for design leadership roles at this level.

Experience:

• 6+ years of experience designing software products.

• 3+ years of experience specifically managing and mentoring product designers.

• Proven success leading design for complex products at scale, preferably within enterprise environments.

Required Skills:

• Design Management & Leadership: Proven ability to lead, mentor, and grow a team of product and content designers. Experience with hiring, coaching, and performance management.

• Product Design Expertise: Deep understanding of the software design process, from research and ideation to execution and iteration.

• Systems Thinking: Ability to design and manage complex, interconnected systems and understand how individual components impact the whole.

• User-Centered Design: Strong advocacy for user needs and the ability to translate them into effective design solutions.

• Collaboration & Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to build trusted relationships across design, product, engineering, and executive stakeholders.

• Project Planning & Prioritization: Skill in guiding teams through complex project lifecycles, setting clear priorities, and managing multiple workstreams.

• Craftsmanship: Upholding and driving a high standard for interaction design, visual design, and overall user experience quality.

• Problem Framing: Ability to identify key user problems and business opportunities, and to frame them effectively for design solutions.

• Technical Fluency: Developing a strong technical understanding to design effectively and communicate with engineering teams.

• Distributed Team Management: Experience leading and fostering connection within remote teams.

• Outcomes Focus: Driven by setting clear OKRs, measuring progress, and ensuring design delivers tangible business and user impact.

• Empathy & Resilience: Ability to lead with empathy for customers and colleagues, and resilience to handle feedback and adapt.

Preferred Skills:

• AI/ML Product Experience: Strong preference for experience working with AI-powered product surfaces or features that enable AI and machine learning use cases.

• Experimentation & A/B Testing: Strong preference for experience with experimentation and A/B testing methodologies to validate design decisions.

• 0→1 Feature Initiatives: Experience leading the design of entirely new features from concept to launch.

📝 Enhancement Note: The qualifications clearly distinguish between foundational design experience and specific management experience, setting a clear expectation for candidates. The emphasis on "enterprise-grade environments" and "scale of a multi-product platform" points towards a candidate experienced in complex, high-stakes product development. The preferred skills in AI/ML and experimentation indicate areas of strategic growth for Atlassian and Jira.

📊 Process & Systems Portfolio Requirements

Portfolio Essentials:

• System-Oriented Work: Showcase high-quality, system-oriented design work across multiple product surfaces. Demonstrate an understanding of how individual design elements fit into a larger, cohesive system.

• Leadership Impact: Clearly articulate your team’s role in projects, your specific leadership impact, and how the design decisions you guided advanced both business and user goals.

• Process & Methodology: Illustrate your approach to design strategy, problem framing, user research, and execution. Highlight how you guide teams through the design lifecycle.

• Scalability & Enterprise Context: Provide examples of designs that are scalable, maintainable, and meet the demands of enterprise-grade software with high availability, security, and performance requirements.

• Collaboration Examples: Showcase instances where you built trusted relationships and collaborated effectively with product, engineering, and other cross-functional teams to achieve design outcomes.

Process Documentation:

• Design Workflow Optimization: Demonstrate experience in refining and optimizing design workflows to improve efficiency, collaboration, and output quality within a team.

• User Research Integration: Show how you integrate user research, product data, and user insights into the design process to inform strategy and decision-making.

• System Design & Governance: Provide examples of how you contribute to or manage design systems, ensuring consistency, scalability, and adherence to established patterns.

• Outcome Measurement: Illustrate how you define success metrics for design initiatives and track their impact on business and user goals, potentially through experimentation or data analysis.

📝 Enhancement Note: The portfolio requirements are heavily focused on demonstrating leadership impact, system-level thinking, and experience with complex, large-scale products. Candidates should be prepared to showcase not just their own design work, but how they enabled and guided a team to produce high-quality, impactful results within an enterprise context. Emphasis on "system-oriented work" and "scalable design" is crucial.

💵 Compensation & Benefits

Salary Range: For a Design Manager role with 6+ years of design experience and 3+ years of management experience, in Sydney, Australia, a competitive salary range would typically fall between AUD $150,000 - $220,000 per year, depending on the candidate's specific experience, qualifications, and the final scope of responsibilities.

Benefits:

• Health and Wellbeing Resources: Comprehensive support for physical, mental, and emotional health.

• Paid Volunteer Days: Opportunities to give back to the community.

• Global Mobility: Support for Atlassians to work in different countries.

• Remote Work Flexibility: Ability to work from home or a combination of home and office, with control over personal work-life balance.

• Stock Options: Potential for equity in a successful global technology company.

• Professional Development: Opportunities for learning, upskilling, and career growth.

• Retirement Savings Plan: Contributions to superannuation (Australia's mandatory retirement savings scheme).

• Parental Leave: Generous leave policies for new parents.

Working Hours: While a standard full-time work week is typically 40 hours, Atlassian emphasizes flexibility. For this remote role, working hours should align with the Eastern Australian Time Zone (AEST/AEDT) to facilitate team collaboration, but there's an expectation of control over personal goals and priorities.

📝 Enhancement Note: The salary range provided is an estimate based on industry benchmarks for Design Manager roles in Sydney, Australia, considering the experience level and company size/prestige of Atlassian. Specific benefits may vary, and candidates are encouraged to inquire directly. The remote work arrangement is coupled with a specific time zone requirement, indicating a need for synchronized collaboration.

🎯 Team & Company Context

🏢 Company Culture

Industry: Software Development / Collaboration Tools / Enterprise Software. Atlassian is a leader in providing software for developers, project managers, and all teams to create, plan, and solve problems together.

Company Size: Atlassian is a large, global organization with over 10,000 employees worldwide. This scale means established processes, significant resources, and opportunities for impact across a broad user base.

Founded: Atlassian was founded in 2002. Its growth from a small startup to a major public company reflects a culture of innovation, customer focus, and iterative improvement.

Team Structure:

• Design Leadership: The Design Manager reports to a Senior Design Manager, indicating a clear hierarchy and support structure within the design organization.

• Cross-Functional Teams: Design Managers are embedded within product teams, working closely with Product Managers and Engineering Managers to drive product strategy and execution.

• Global Distribution: Atlassian operates as a distributed-first company, meaning teams are geographically dispersed. This requires a strong emphasis on asynchronous communication, clear documentation, and intentional connection-building.

Methodology:

• Data-Driven Decisions: Atlassian leverages product data, user research, and experimentation (like A/B testing) to inform design and product strategy.

• Agile Development: The company likely employs agile methodologies, requiring flexibility, iterative development, and close collaboration between design, product, and engineering.

• Customer Focus: A deep understanding of customer needs and pain points is central to Atlassian's product development philosophy.

• Process Optimization: Continuous improvement of internal processes, including design workflows, is a key cultural element.

Company Website: https://www.atlassian.com/

📝 Enhancement Note: Atlassian's culture is known for being collaborative, customer-focused, and driven by innovation. As a large, global, and distributed company, there's a strong emphasis on clear communication, documentation, and empowering individuals and teams. The "Jira Frontier" team likely embodies these principles while pushing the boundaries of Jira's capabilities.

📈 Career & Growth Analysis

Operations Career Level: This role is a mid-to-senior level Design Management position. It requires significant individual contributor experience in product design coupled with proven leadership and people management capabilities. The scope involves strategic influence over a critical product area (Jira Frontier) and direct management of a design team.

Reporting Structure: The Design Manager reports to a Senior Design Manager. This implies a career path that could lead to Senior Design Manager, Group Design Manager, or Director-level positions within Atlassian's design organization. The role also involves close collaboration and partnership with Product and Engineering leadership at a similar or higher level.

Operations Impact: The Design Manager's impact is directly tied to the success of Jira Frontier. By improving collaboration and driving expansion, the role influences user adoption, customer satisfaction, and ultimately, Atlassian's revenue and market position in the project management and team collaboration space. Strategic design decisions can significantly impact product usability, scalability, and innovation.

Growth Opportunities:

• Leadership Progression: Potential to move into Senior Design Manager roles, overseeing larger teams or more strategic product areas, or exploring Group Design Manager positions for broader organizational responsibility.

• Strategic Influence: Opportunity to shape the future of Jira, a flagship product, and influence Atlassian's broader design strategy and operational excellence in product development.

• Skill Development: Continuous learning through managing diverse talent, working on complex technical challenges, engaging with AI/ML technologies, and honing skills in distributed team leadership.

• Industry Exposure: Working with cutting-edge technologies and best practices in a leading software company, with potential for speaking engagements or contributions to design thought leadership.

📝 Enhancement Note: This role offers a clear path for career advancement within a well-established design organization. The emphasis on strategic impact and leadership development makes it an attractive position for experienced design leaders looking to grow their careers within the SaaS and collaboration software industry.

🌐 Work Environment

Office Type: Atlassian operates as a "distributed-first" company. While they maintain office spaces, the primary work arrangement for this role is remote. The focus is on creating effective virtual collaboration environments.

Office Location(s): While the role is remote and requires residence within the Eastern Australian Time Zone, Atlassian has numerous office locations globally, including in Sydney, Australia. These offices serve as hubs for collaboration when needed or preferred.

Workspace Context:

• Remote Collaboration: The environment is optimized for remote work, emphasizing asynchronous communication tools, transparent documentation, and virtual team-building activities.

• Tools & Technology: Design teams are equipped with industry-standard design and collaboration tools (e.g., Jira, Confluence, Figma, Miro) to facilitate seamless remote work.

• Team Interaction: While remote, opportunities for connection exist through virtual team meetings, 1:1s, design critiques, and company-wide events. The time zone requirement ensures a core overlap for synchronous collaboration.

Work Schedule: The role is full-time, with an expectation of alignment with the Eastern Australian Time Zone for core collaboration hours. Atlassian generally supports flexible work arrangements, allowing employees to manage their schedules to achieve work-life balance, provided team collaboration needs are met.

📝 Enhancement Note: The "distributed-first" model at Atlassian means the work environment is intentionally designed to support remote employees, rather than treating remote work as an exception. This requires a high degree of self-discipline, proactivity in communication, and comfort with digital collaboration tools.

📄 Application & Portfolio Review Process

Interview Process:

• Initial Screening: A recruiter will review your application and resume, focusing on experience aligning with the job description, particularly design management and complex product delivery.

• Hiring Manager Interview: An interview with the Senior Design Manager to assess your leadership philosophy, management style, strategic thinking, and alignment with Atlassian's culture and the Jira Frontier team's goals. This is where your portfolio will likely be discussed.

• Design Team/Cross-Functional Interviews: Interviews with other designers, product managers, and engineers. These sessions will evaluate your collaborative skills, technical understanding, problem-solving abilities, and how you approach design challenges and provide feedback.

• Portfolio Presentation: A dedicated session where you will present a curated selection of your work, focusing on leadership projects, system design, and impactful outcomes. You will need to articulate your team's contributions, your leadership role, and the results achieved.

• Executive/Final Interview: Potentially an interview with a higher-level leader to assess overall fit, strategic vision, and long-term potential.

Portfolio Review Tips:

• Focus on Leadership & Impact: Showcase projects where you led a team, influenced strategy, and drove significant outcomes. Clearly delineate your role from your team's contributions.

• Systemic Thinking: Highlight examples of complex systems you've designed or managed, emphasizing scalability, consistency, and how individual components contribute to the whole.

• Problem Framing & Solution: Clearly articulate the problem you were solving, your process for understanding it (research, data), and how your team developed and executed the solution.

• Metrics & Outcomes: Quantify the impact of your work whenever possible. Use data, case studies, and A/B testing results to demonstrate user and business value.

• Tailor to Jira Frontier: Understand Jira's current landscape and Atlassian's focus on collaboration. Frame your experience in a way that resonates with the "Jira Frontier" mission (expansion, collaboration).

• Storytelling: Present your work as compelling narratives. Explain the context, challenges, your approach, and the results in a way that engages the interviewer.

Challenge Preparation:

• Design Exercise (Potential): Be prepared for a design exercise, which might involve a take-home challenge or a live whiteboarding session. This could focus on problem-solving, system design, or strategic thinking related to collaboration tools.

• Situational Questions: Anticipate questions about how you handle conflict, manage underperforming team members, prioritize work, give feedback, and foster an inclusive environment.

• Technical Acumen: Brush up on your understanding of software development processes and how design integrates with engineering, especially concerning large-scale platforms.

📝 Enhancement Note: The interview process at Atlassian is known to be thorough, aiming to assess not just technical skills but also cultural fit, leadership potential, and collaborative abilities. A well-prepared portfolio that clearly demonstrates leadership and impact on complex systems is paramount.

🛠 Tools & Technology Stack

Primary Tools:

• Design & Prototyping: Figma (highly probable for collaborative design), Sketch, Adobe Creative Suite.

• Collaboration & Workflow: Jira, Confluence (essential for Atlassian products), Trello.

• Prototyping & User Testing: InVision, Maze, UserTesting.com.

• Whiteboarding & Ideation: Miro, Mural.

Analytics & Reporting:

• Product Analytics: Amplitude, Pendo, Google Analytics, Mixpanel (for understanding user behavior and feature adoption).

• Reporting Dashboards: Tableau, Power BI, or internal Atlassian analytics tools for visualizing key metrics.

CRM & Automation:

• CRM: Salesforce (likely used by Atlassian for sales and customer management).

• Automation: Understanding of how design impacts automated workflows within Jira and other Atlassian products.

📝 Enhancement Note: Proficiency with Figma is almost a given for a design role at a company like Atlassian, given its widespread adoption for collaborative design. Deep familiarity with Jira and Confluence is also critical, as these are Atlassian's core products and form the backbone of their internal operations and product development.

👥 Team Culture & Values

Operations Values: Atlassian's core values are:

• Openness: Encourages candid feedback and transparency.

• Honesty: Fosters integrity and trust in all interactions.

• Unity: Promotes collaboration and a sense of shared purpose.

• Playfulness: Cultivates a fun, engaging, and innovative work environment.

• Perfection: Drives a commitment to quality and continuous improvement.

Collaboration Style:

• Cross-Functional Partnership: Design teams work in tight-knit partnerships with Product Management and Engineering, often referred to as "trio" or "squad" models.

• Asynchronous Communication: Given the distributed nature, there's a strong emphasis on clear, concise written communication and documentation to ensure information is accessible to all, regardless of location or time zone.

• Feedback Culture: Openness to giving and receiving constructive feedback is encouraged across all levels, particularly during design critiques and team retrospectives.

• Empowerment: Teams and individuals are empowered to make decisions and take ownership of their work.

📝 Enhancement Note: Atlassian's values are deeply ingrained in their culture and hiring process. Candidates should be prepared to demonstrate how they embody these values in their leadership and teamwork. The emphasis on collaboration and feedback is crucial for success in a distributed environment.

⚡ Challenges & Growth Opportunities

Challenges:

• Scale & Complexity: Managing design for a product as large and complex as Jira, serving millions of users with diverse needs, presents significant challenges in maintaining consistency, usability, and performance.

• Distributed Team Management: Effectively leading and fostering connection within a remote team across different locations and time zones requires intentional effort and strong communication strategies.

• Balancing Innovation and Stability: The "Frontier" team's mandate for expansion and improvement needs to be balanced with the need for stability and reliability in Jira's core functionality.

• Evolving Technology Landscape: Staying ahead of trends, particularly in areas like AI/ML and collaboration technologies, while ensuring designs are future-proof and technically feasible.

• Stakeholder Alignment: Navigating diverse stakeholder needs and priorities across product, engineering, marketing, and sales to ensure design vision is understood and supported.

Learning & Development Opportunities:

• Advanced Design Leadership: Opportunities to hone skills in strategic planning, team building, and influencing product roadmaps at a high level.

• Specialization in Collaboration Tech: Deepening expertise in the rapidly evolving field of team collaboration software and its underlying technologies.

• AI/ML Integration: Gaining hands-on experience with integrating AI and machine learning into product design, a key growth area for Atlassian.

• Global Operations Experience: Learning best practices for managing distributed teams and operations within a large, multinational technology company.

• Mentorship: Access to senior leaders within Atlassian's extensive design and product organizations for guidance and mentorship.

📝 Enhancement Note: The challenges presented are typical for senior leadership roles in major tech companies, requiring strategic thinking, adaptability, and strong interpersonal skills. The growth opportunities are substantial, offering significant professional development in leadership, technology, and product strategy.

💡 Interview Preparation

Strategy Questions:

• Design Strategy & Vision: "How would you approach developing a design strategy for Jira Frontier, focusing on improving collaboration and driving expansion?" (Prepare to discuss framework, user research integration, and alignment with business goals.)

• Team Leadership & Management: "Describe a time you had to coach a designer through a difficult performance challenge or help them grow a specific skill. What was your approach, and what was the outcome?" (Focus on empathy, actionable feedback, and development plans.)

• Problem-Solving & Execution: "Walk us through a complex product design challenge you led your team to solve. What were the constraints, your process, and the measurable impact of the solution?" (Be ready to present a case study from your portfolio.)

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: "How do you build trust and effective working relationships with Product Managers and Engineers, especially when there are differing opinions on design direction?" (Highlight communication strategies, negotiation skills, and shared goal alignment.)

Company & Culture Questions:

• Cultural Fit: "Atlassian values 'Openness, Honesty, Unity, Playfulness, Perfection.' Can you provide an example of how you've embodied one of these values in your leadership role?" (Connect your experiences to Atlassian's core values.)

• Distributed Teams: "What are the key challenges and best practices for managing a remote design team, and how do you foster connection and collaboration?" (Refer to your experience and Atlassian's distributed-first model.)

• Impact Measurement: "How do you ensure your design team's work is measurable and demonstrably impacts business and user outcomes?" (Discuss OKRs, KPIs, and data-driven approaches.)

Portfolio Presentation Strategy:

• Curate for Impact: Select 2-3 projects that best showcase your leadership, system design thinking, and ability to drive measurable outcomes. Prioritize projects with clear leadership involvement.

• Tell a Story: For each project, clearly articulate the problem, your team's role, your leadership approach, the challenges faced, the design process, and the tangible results (qualitative and quantitative).

• Highlight Systemic Thinking: If possible, choose projects that demonstrate your ability to design for complex systems and ensure consistency across multiple surfaces.

• Quantify Results: Use data, metrics, and user feedback to demonstrate the success of your designs and your team's efforts.

• Prepare for Q&A: Anticipate questions about your design decisions, leadership style, how you handle trade-offs, and how you would apply your learnings to Jira Frontier.

📝 Enhancement Note: Preparation for Atlassian interviews should focus on demonstrating leadership, strategic thinking, and a deep understanding of user-centered design within a complex, enterprise software context. The portfolio presentation is a critical component, requiring a clear narrative of impact and leadership.

📌 Application Steps

To apply for this Design Manager position:

• Submit Your Application: Visit the Atlassian Careers page and submit your application through the provided link, ensuring all required fields are completed accurately.

• Tailor Your Resume: Highlight your experience in design management, leading product and content design teams, working on complex/enterprise software, and driving measurable outcomes. Use keywords from the job description such as "Design Management," "Product Design," "Systems Thinking," "User-Centered Design," and "Collaboration."

• Prepare Your Portfolio: Curate a portfolio that showcases your leadership impact, system-oriented design work, and your ability to drive results. Ensure it clearly articulates your team's contributions and your role in guiding them. Focus on projects demonstrating experience in enterprise environments and complex product scaling.

• Research Atlassian: Familiarize yourself with Atlassian's products (especially Jira and Confluence), company culture, values, and recent news. Understand their "distributed-first" philosophy and their focus on team collaboration.

• Practice Interview Responses: Prepare for behavioral questions related to leadership, collaboration, problem-solving, and your experience with remote teams, using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result). Practice articulating your design strategy and presenting your portfolio effectively.

⚠️ Important Notice: This enhanced job description includes AI-generated insights and operations industry-standard assumptions. All details should be verified directly with the hiring organization before making application decisions.