# James Y. > Design Program Manager at LinkedIn Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jamesy I help design teams move faster, ship with more confidence, and get involved in the moments that build great products. The work I'm most proud of lately: leading a company-wide initiative to train product designers as active software contributors. 25 designers shipping production code. 10,000+ lines merged. As a non-designer, I've proven the power of these tools by using Claude, Cursor (and other tooling) to ship my own production fixes, which has given me a grounded, yet evolving view of how design can provide value in organizations. On the operations side, I manage planning and resources across multiple design organizations — quarterly intake, funding decisions, executive communications, director and new designer onboarding. I take on programs to reduce overhead that allows creative teams to prioritize work that matters, and I've been able to increase the level and speed of this support by incorporating agentic tooling. ## Work Experience ### Design Program Manager, Enterprise Products @ LinkedIn Jan 2022 – Present | San Francisco, CA Program management for enterprise product design teams: building B2B infrastructure and experiences used by advertisers, sales teams, and business customers globally. - Led an initiative to turn product designers into active software contributors: 25 designers merged production code across 223 pull requests (149 merged), shipping 10,000+ lines of code with a 6-minute median time to first engineering review. - Personally used AI-assisted development to ship production fixes in Campaign Manager, gaining firsthand fluency with AI-augmented workflows and informing how design teams evaluate and adopt these tools. - Scaled program management across two design organizations simultaneously during a staffing transition, maintaining delivery quality across 30+ active projects per quarter. - Drove design's involvement in annual and half-year product planning — managing intake, funding decisions, and resource sequencing across multiple product and engineering teams. - Reduced new designer onboarding time by rapidly pulling onboarding resources. - Developed and distributed company-wide communications on the AI/full-stack-builder design initiative for senior product and design leadership, distributed to hundreds of stakeholders. Prev: Consumer DPM supporting Profile, Pages, Messaging, Groups ### Design Program Manager, Horizontal Programs @ LinkedIn Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 In this horizontal role I supported the entire ~300 person Product Design & UX Research organization at LinkedIn, managing finance operations (budget, vendors, contractors) and supporting internal/external talent programs. - Budgeting and Resource Management: Successfully optimized budget processes during macroeconomic challenges, creating templates still utilized across the organization. - Hiring and Req Management: Fostered effective partnerships within Recruiting, Finance, and Design leadership stakeholders, taking a collaborative approach to meet hiring objectives. DPC → DPM ### Program Manager, Design @ California College of the Arts Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco, California, United States Managed day-to-day administration of 200+ students, 30+ faculty, and studio spaces for two of the largest programs at CCA, Illustration and Interaction Design (UX). Owned budgets, degree tracking, and course enrollment management. Planned and executed online and in-person events, including guest speaker series and year-end thesis exhibition. Onboarded new remote productivity tools, including Notion, Padlet, and Slack. Recruiter (Jan 2018 - Nov 2019) Served as territory manager for domestic recruiting in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest, and led recruitment strategy and outreach at high schools, college fairs, and community organizations. ### Writer @ Freelance Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 ### Fall Residency Assistant (International Writing Program) @ University of Iowa Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Iowa City, Iowa Trained and managed a team of student staffers for IWP-sponsored presentations and events. Coordinated support and audio-visual staffing, organized transportation services for 30+ distinguished writers-in-residence. Wrote and edited internal and external documents, including grant report letters to arts and cultural funding organizations. ### Graduate Teaching Assistant @ University of Iowa Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Iowa City, Iowa ### Graduate Research Assistant @ University of Iowa Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Iowa City, Iowa ### Teaching Fellow @ Princeton in Asia Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 | Khon Kaen, Thailand ## Education ### MFA in Fiction | Iowa Writers' Workshop University of Iowa ### BA in English University of Pennsylvania ### University of Chicago ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jy1115 --- Source: https://flows.cv/jamesy JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jamesy/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13