Sr. Director, Product Design

HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system that supports agencies, entrepreneurs, and SMBs in building, automating, and scaling their operations. The Senior Director, Product Design will lead design strategy and execution across a strategic product portfolio, ensuring high-quality user experiences and the adoption of a bespoke design system. This role involves collaborating with various teams to create cohesive and impactful product experiences that drive customer success.

Responsibilities:

• Define and communicate a compelling design vision for a large, integrated product portfolio
• Translate company and product strategy into experience principles, customer journeys, design priorities and measurable outcomes
• Identify opportunities to unify fragmented workflows into cohesive, AI-powered experiences that help customers move faster and get better results
• Represent the customer, the end-to-end experience and the quality bar in executive-level product and business discussions
• Own the evolution of HighLevel's bespoke design system as a practical product accelerator, not just a library of components
• Partner with design system, product design and engineering leaders to mature shared patterns, component quality, interaction standards and contribution models
• Work horizontally across many product teams and functions to turn a new design system into a shared way of building, aligning designers, PMs, engineers and go-to-market partners around consistent experience standards
• Drive adoption across product teams by making the system easier to use, easier to contribute to and clearly tied to product quality and execution speed
• Reduce pattern drift and inconsistent experiences across the platform while still allowing teams to solve domain-specific product problems
• Establish measures for design system adoption, contribution quality, component reliability and customer-facing consistency
• Define, model and scale a high bar for visual craft, interaction quality, product design thinking and end-to-end usability
• Coach design managers and senior ICs on how to recognize, critique and improve the quality of design work before it reaches customers
• Create critique rituals, quality reviews and launch-readiness practices that improve outputs without slowing teams down unnecessarily
• Ensure major launches are grounded in clear user needs, durable interaction patterns, thoughtful visual execution and measurable success criteria
• Build a culture where speed and quality reinforce each other instead of competing with each other
• Lead design across multiple product teams and product lines, ensuring the work connects into a coherent platform experience
• Partner with Product and Engineering leaders to shape roadmaps, clarify tradeoffs and sequence work based on customer value and business impact
• Guide teams through ambiguous, high-stakes product problems that require systems thinking, strategic judgment and strong execution
• Connect growth, commerce, marketplace, community, admin, integration and platform utility experiences into customer journeys that feel cohesive
• Build, coach and retain a high-performing design team capable of operating at HighLevel's speed and scale
• Hire exceptional design talent, elevate existing designers and create clear growth paths for managers and individual contributors
• Performance manage thoughtfully and directly when designers need additional support, clearer expectations or role calibration
• Lead senior designers and design managers through direct feedback, career development, performance calibration and succession planning
• Establish team rituals, staffing models and operating rhythms that improve clarity, accountability and output quality across a remote-first global team
• Use research, analytics, experimentation and customer feedback to identify opportunities and evaluate design impact
• Drive improvements in activation, adoption, conversion, retention, expansion, customer ROI and overall product usability
• Partner with Growth, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success to understand customer segments, buying journeys and value realization moments
• Ensure design decisions balance customer value with measurable business outcomes
• Shape how AI and automation show up across HighLevel's product experience in ways that are useful, trustworthy and easy to adopt
• Help move product experiences from standalone tools toward intelligent workflows that can guide, recommend and execute for customers
• Partner with product and technical leaders to define interaction patterns for AI-powered workflows, assistants, recommendations and generated content
• Ensure AI experiences remain understandable, controllable and aligned with customer goals
• Build trusted relationships with leaders across Product, Engineering, Data, Marketing, Sales, Support and Customer Success
• Bring clarity to complex initiatives with crisp narratives, decision frameworks and customer-centered recommendations
• Align stakeholders around customer problems, business goals, quality standards, tradeoffs and sequencing
• Act as a key executive voice for design internally and, when appropriate, externally with customers, partners and the broader market

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience in product design, UX or related product experience disciplines, including 5+ years leading design teams
• Proven experience leading design across large, complex B2B SaaS, platform or multi-product ecosystems
• Superb visual craft skills and world-class interaction and product design instincts, with the ability to raise the quality of work across a team
• Demonstrated experience building, evolving or accelerating adoption of a design system across multiple product teams
• Demonstrated ability to lead senior individual contributors and design managers across multiple teams or product areas
• Strong portfolio of work showing product strategy, systems thinking, design craft, measurable customer impact and business outcomes
• Deep experience with complex workflows, information architecture, interaction design, design systems, research and experimentation
• Proven ability to hire excellent designers, elevate existing talent and performance manage team members who need additional support
• Strong product and business acumen, with fluency in metrics such as activation, adoption, conversion, retention, expansion, churn, LTV and customer ROI
• Experience partnering with Product, Engineering and Data leadership to define strategy, priorities, roadmaps and success measures
• Strong executive communication, storytelling and stakeholder management skills
• Comfort operating in fast-paced, ambiguous environments with distributed teams and high ownership expectations
• Experience designing for agency platforms, CRM tools, marketing technology, sales automation, lead generation, commerce, payments or SMB software
• Experience with product-led growth, lifecycle design, monetization, onboarding, activation or retention systems
• Experience shaping AI-powered product experiences, automation workflows or intelligent assistants
• Experience leading design through a period of rapid scale, design-system maturation, platform consolidation or major product transformation
• Familiarity with experimentation frameworks, growth metrics, customer analytics and mixed-method research practices
• Experience designing marketplace, community, course, client-portal, commerce, payments, billing, document or integration experiences