Design Program Manager

HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system that supports agencies, entrepreneurs, and SMBs. They are hiring a Design Program Manager to help mature their design process into a clear and repeatable system while maintaining the company's ability to move quickly.

Responsibilities:

• Build and run Product Design's core operating cadence, including weekly status, critiques, design reviews, quarterly planning, and decision follow-through
• Create lightweight systems that make priorities, milestones, dependencies, risks, and ownership clear across multiple product areas
• Establish practical engagement models between Design and Product, Engineering, Research, and Data so teams know when and how to work together
• Improve launch readiness by helping teams surface quality risks, clarify tradeoffs, and understand what is ready to ship
• Partner with design systems leaders to strengthen craft rituals, shared standards, and adoption of reusable patterns across product teams
• Give design leadership better visibility into capacity, resourcing pressure, delivery risks, and operational bottlenecks as the org grows
• Reduce recurring fire drills and low-level project wrangling by turning ad hoc coordination into repeatable workflows
• Partner with the centralized program management office and Product/Engineering operations while representing the needs of Product Design
• Serve as the operational backbone of Research, owning consent management and incentive processing to enable researchers to run concurrent programs at scale
• Help bridge multiple time zones (PST, EST and IST) and management levels to optimize for visibility of design team work

Requirements:

• Have 7+ years of experience in design program management, design operations, product operations, technical program management, or a related role supporting product/design/engineering teams
• Have worked in a high-growth product environment where priorities shift quickly and process needs to serve the work, not dominate it
• Understand product design deeply enough to improve critiques, reviews, design quality rituals, and delivery workflows without needing to be the design decision-maker
• Are excellent at turning ambiguity into operating clarity: agendas, decision logs, milestone plans, dependency maps, status systems, escalation paths, and practical rituals people actually use
• Can build trust with designers while also being credible with product managers, engineers, researchers, and data partners
• Know how to diagnose whether a problem is caused by unclear ownership, weak prioritization, poor communication, missing information, unrealistic timing, or an actual design gap
• Communicate clearly and calmly, especially when teams are moving fast, tradeoffs are uncomfortable, or priorities are changing
• Are comfortable working at multiple altitudes: helping shape an engagement model one hour and cleaning up a messy project tracker the next
• Have strong judgment about when to add structure, when to simplify, and when to get out of the team's way
• Experience as the first design program manager or design operations hire in a scaling product organization
• Experience supporting a design org of 25+ people across multiple product areas
• Experience with design systems operations, product launch readiness, or cross-functional planning rituals
• Familiarity with AI-enabled workflows for summarizing signals, maintaining operating systems, identifying risks, or making team communication more effective
• Experience in B2B SaaS, platform products, multi-product suites, or products serving both SMB and partner/channel customers