Design Program Manager, Events

This role owns the end-to-end design stream program architecture for internal and external events at Shopify. You will drive event programs from ambiguity to execution, build scalable systems for events, lead cross-functional alignment, and use AI as a core tool. The role requires operating with authority and judgment, ensuring event experiences reflect the quality and ambition of Shopify's design organization.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end program management of design-led event initiatives, from intake and scoping through delivery, retrospective, and iteration. Owning the feasibility of hundreds of moving deliverables, with a lot of parallel workstreams towards a final fixed date.
• Translate ambiguous design event goals into clear program plans, operating rhythms, milestones, owners, and decision points.
• Orchestrate roadmaps, people, timelines, and resources to deliver high-quality outcomes with urgency.
• Create clarity across complex, cross-functional workstreams by surfacing the right signal at the right time, supporting the team on making the right trade-off decisions
• Build the systems, rituals, and communication structures that allow event teams to move quickly and confidently.
• Develop repeatable frameworks for event design: planning, creative development, stakeholder reviews, production workflows, launch readiness, and post-event learning.
• Identify and subtract unnecessary processes, meetings, approvals, and toil that slow teams down.
• Create reusable tools, templates, operating models, and decision-making mechanisms that improve speed and quality over time.
• Design lightweight systems that help teams do the right things, not all things.
• Build for Shopify’s long-term event program health, not just immediate delivery needs.
• Drive coordination across Design, Product, Marketing, Communications, Agency, Leadership, and other relevant teams.
• Make alignment happen by clarifying ownership, dependencies, tradeoffs, risks, and decisions.
• Influence through evidence, logic, strong judgment, and a clear point of view.
• Identify when teams are misaligned, when decisions are stuck, or when scope is drifting, and intervene with a proposed path forward.
• Clear and calm communication, that can escalate effectively, ensuring leadership and partners have the right level of visibility without creating noise.
• Maintain a clear view of priorities, dependencies, and capacity across the event portfolio.
• Create a clear intake process, with visibility for the whole team.
• Use AI as an everyday tool of trade to improve planning, synthesis, documentation, scenario modeling, workflow design, and decision support.
• Identify opportunities to use AI to reduce manual toil, improve program visibility, and accelerate event operations.
• Model AI-enabled ways of working for partners and collaborators.

Requirements

• Significant experience in program management, design program management, creative operations, event operations, or related roles.
• Real print and fabrication knowledge. Prepress, dielines, materials, lead times, proofing cycles, and what "ready for vendor" actually means. Enough to build honest timelines and clear production checks without pulling a designer in.
• Proven ability to lead complex, cross-functional programs with many stakeholders, dependencies, and moving parts.
• Experience managing event-related workstreams such as creative development, production timelines, content programming, experiential design, launch moments, executive reviews, or partner coordination.
• Agency and vendor management. Tracking scope against the SOW, holding the agency to its input deadlines, and running fabrication with vendors through their proof cycles.
• Strong systems thinking and ability to design lightweight operating models that scale.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to create clarity for executives, creative teams, production partners, and cross-functional stakeholders.
• A bias toward action, urgency, and resourcefulness.
• A track record of reducing complexity, removing blockers, and improving how teams work.
• Comfort using AI tools to accelerate thinking, planning, documentation, and execution.
• A strong point of view on how great event programs should operate — and the ability to evolve that point of view through evidence and learning.