Sr. Manager, Product Design

HighLevel

2d•$196,000 - $250,000•Remote

About The Position

HighLevel is seeking a Senior Manager, Product Design to lead design for its core platform experiences, mobile experiences for native platforms, and the design system team. This role reports to the Senior Director, Product Design and will manage approximately 8 product designers across the United States and India. The ideal candidate will have exceptional aesthetic judgment, visual craft, and interaction-design taste, along with the leadership ability to improve the team's work. A significant part of this role involves managing the design system team, enhancing its strategy and execution in partnership with the Senior Director, to improve internal tooling and the overall customer UX/UI. HighLevel values velocity, ownership, and practical innovation, and is adopting AI-assisted production workflows, seeking leaders curious about new ways of working to achieve better results faster. The product and design scope includes leading design execution and quality across core platform experiences (customer management, account navigation, settings, workflows), native mobile experiences, and design system strategy and practices, including AI-assisted workflows. The role requires leading a team of approximately 8 designers, overseeing design quality, managing the design system team, fostering a high-velocity operating rhythm, setting a higher bar for design output, and developing talent. Key responsibilities include team leadership and management, focusing on coaching, development, performance management, hiring, and building a strong team culture. Craft, aesthetic quality, and product excellence involve raising the bar for design output, leading critiques, ensuring releases are grounded in user needs, and encouraging responsible use of AI tools. Core platform and mobile design leadership includes guiding design execution for desktop and mobile experiences, partnering with Product and Engineering, and ensuring a cohesive product experience. Design system leadership involves managing the design system team, evolving the design system as a strategic accelerator, and driving adoption of shared components and patterns. Cross-functional collaboration and business impact require building strong partnerships with various departments, representing design in planning, and working effectively across time zones and cultures.

Requirements

9+ years of experience in product design, UX or related product experience disciplines, including 3+ years managing product designers
Proven experience managing designers across complex B2B SaaS, platform, mobile or multi-product environments
Exceptional aesthetic judgment, visual craft and interaction-design taste, with the ability to raise the quality of work across a team
Experience leading critique, coaching designers and helping teams make strong design decisions
Experience leading or line managing design system work, including component libraries, shared patterns, contribution models, documentation, governance or adoption across product teams
Experience managing distributed teams and working across time zones; experience working closely with India-based teams is a strong plus
Demonstrated ability to hire strong designers, develop existing talent and performance manage team members who need additional support
Strong product judgment and comfort balancing customer needs, business outcomes, technical constraints and speed of execution
Familiarity with AI-assisted production tools such as Cursor, Claude Code or exploratory "vibe coding" workflows, and enthusiasm for using them thoughtfully to improve design velocity and collaboration
Comfort operating in fast-paced, ambiguous environments with high ownership expectations

Responsibilities

Manage, coach and develop approximately 8 product designers across US and India teams
Set clear expectations for quality, ownership, collaboration and delivery
Hire excellent talent, onboard new designers and help the team grow with intention
Elevate designers through coaching, stretch opportunities and clear development plans
Performance manage thoughtfully and directly when designers need additional support, sharper expectations or role calibration
Build a team culture that values speed, ownership, craft and customer impact
Raise the bar for design output across aesthetic quality, visual craft, interaction quality, product design thinking and customer-centered execution
Help create a step change in HighLevel's design practice by making quality standards sharper, more visible and more consistently applied
Lead critiques and quality reviews that improve the work before it reaches customers
Ensure major releases are grounded in clear user needs, thoughtful flows, durable interaction patterns and refined visual execution
Encourage responsible use of AI-assisted tools and workflows to accelerate exploration, prototyping, documentation and production collaboration
Lead design execution across core platform experiences that support navigation, account management, configuration, workflow execution and customer operations
Guide mobile design for native platforms, ensuring the experience is focused, useful and appropriately adapted to mobile customer needs
Partner with Product and Engineering to clarify priorities, shape roadmaps, identify tradeoffs and maintain a high-quality customer experience
Connect work across desktop, mobile and shared platform surfaces so customers experience HighLevel as one coherent product
Line manage the design system team and help evolve HighLevel's bespoke design system into a strategic accelerator for product quality, execution speed and customer experience
Partner with the Senior Director on design system strategy, priorities, governance and adoption across the broader product portfolio
Work horizontally across product, design and engineering teams to drive adoption of shared components, patterns and interaction standards
Reduce pattern drift across core platform and mobile experiences through clear guidance, reusable patterns and strong examples of the desired UX/UI quality
Build strong operating partnerships with Product, Engineering, Data, Support and Customer Success
Represent design in planning, roadmap and delivery conversations with clarity and sound product judgment
Work effectively across time zones and cultures, especially between US and India teams
Model the pace, ownership and adaptability expected in a high-velocity product environment