Design Program Manager

About the role

The Product Design team is entering a new stage. We are just under 30 people today, spanning product design, research, design systems, and content strategy, with another 12-16 hires expected as the business scales. We have strong momentum and a company-wide bias toward velocity. Now we need a design operating model that can keep pace with that velocity while raising the bar for clarity, craft, coordination, and launch readiness.

We are hiring our first Design Program Manager to help build that model.

What You'll Do

• 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.

What Success Looks Like

• In your first 90 days, you will have built trust with design leadership and key Product, Engineering, Research, and Data partners; mapped the biggest process breakdowns; and improved at least two core rituals such as weekly status, design reviews, critiques, or launch readiness.
• Within six months, Product Design should have a clearer operating rhythm, fewer recurring fire drills, better cross-functional visibility, and more consistent expectations for how work moves from problem definition through design, review, build, and launch.
• Within a year, the design org should be able to grow significantly without relying on heroic coordination from design leadership. Teams should move quickly, but with stronger shared standards, healthier decision-making, and fewer avoidable surprises.

Nice to Have

• 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.

How We Work

• HighLevel moves quickly. We value ownership, practical judgment, and people who can improve the system while staying close to the work.
• This role is for someone who can make a fast-moving design org more mature without making it slower, more bureaucratic, or less ambitious.
• You will report into HighLevel's centralized program management office within the Office of the CTO, with a dotted-line relationship to the VP of Product Design and day-to-day embedded partnership with the Product Design team.
• You will work closely with leaders across Product, Engineering, Research, and Data.

EEO Statement

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Salary Range

The salary range for this position is $129,000 - $159,000 annually.