Lead UX Design Operations Program Manager

About Target:  

Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life. We bring that vision to life through our values and culture. Learn more about Target here. 

Target UX is a group of design, content, research, and accessibility practitioners and experts, with a passion for improving and innovating our digital experiences for Target’s guests, team members, and partners. Here, we pride ourselves on designing tangible, inspiring, and impactful solutions that serve all aspects of our business– and being a part of the team means you will play a critical role for Target’s digital experience by increasing ease, simplicity, value, and delight for every touchpoint.   

About the role:   

As a Lead UX Operations Manager supporting our Guest UX Team, you’ll be at the forefront of Target’s evolving digital experience, shaping it for our guests and contributing to business growth. Our UX Operations practice focuses on the orchestration and optimization of the people, processes, and practice necessary to scale high-quality user experiences across the Target enterprise. You will lean on your design program management expertise to support and develop best practices for our UX team on how we work together, how we get work done, and how our work creates impact. 

In this role, you will partner closely with UX and leadership to drive strategic planning, operational excellence, and execution across some of the organization's highest priority initiatives. You will establish scalable operating models, governance, and delivery practices that enable leaders to make informed decisions, navigate complexity, and successfully execute business priorities. As a trusted thought partner to senior leaders, you will bring visibility to portfolio health, proactively identify risks and dependencies, and influence decisions that shape the direction of the UX organization. You will also help advance modern ways of working by identifying opportunities to leverage AI and automation to improve planning, documentation, operational efficiency, and decision-making. In partnership with design, product, and engineering teams, you will support the thoughtful adoption of emerging tools while maintaining quality, consistency, and governance. 

Responsibilities: 

• Partner with UX and cross-functional senior leaders to define portfolio strategy, operational priorities, roadmaps, and execution plans for high-impact consumer-facing digital product initiatives. 

• Lead cross-functional programs spanning UX, Product, Engineering, Data, and business teams, driving alignment, managing dependencies, mitigating risks, and ensuring delivery against customer and business objectives. 

• Establish governance practices that improve planning, prioritization, execution visibility, accountability, and operational consistency across the UX organization. 

• Help teams introduce AI-assisted and agentic workflows into the product development lifecycle, including workflows supporting research, synthesis, concept development, prototyping, content creation, design systems, design-to-code, engineering handoff, testing, documentation, and delivery management. 

• Partner with UX, Product, Engineering, and Technology leaders to assess where AI agents, coding companions, automation, and connected platforms can improve product-development speed, quality, consistency, and decision-making. 

• Lead pilots and structured experimentation for emerging AI tools and workflows, defining hypotheses, success measures, human-in-the-loop controls, evaluation criteria, and plans for responsible adoption and scale. 

About you:   

• 7+years of experience in digital software product work, with inhouse or agency product design teams 

• Demonstrated experience organizing and delivering complex, consumer-facing digital products across the full product development lifecycle. 

• Experience establishing portfolio-management, program-management, and delivery practices across large, matrixed organizations. 

• Strong analytical capabilities, including experience defining metrics, interpreting product and operational data, identifying patterns, and translating insights into decisions and action. 

• Proven ability to build trusted partnerships with senior leaders, influencing strategic decisions across a highly matrixed organization.  

• Strong AI fluency and practical experience applying generative AI, AI agents, automation, or machine-learning-enabled tools within UX or digital product-development workflows. 

• Technical acumen and the ability to collaborate with designers, engineers, product managers, data practitioners, design-system teams, platform teams, and technology leaders. 

• A systems-thinking mindset, with the ability to understand the interconnected relationships among customer needs, team workflows, product platforms, technology constraints, organizational structures, and business priorities.

This position will operate as a Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement based on Target’s needs. A Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement means the team member’s core role will need to be performed both onsite at the Target HQ MN location the role is assigned to and virtually, depending upon what your role, team and tasks require for that day. Work duties cannot be performed outside of the country of the primary work location, unless otherwise prescribed by Target. Click here if you are curious to learn more about Minnesota.