HighLevel - Design Program Manager

• 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 • 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. • You Might Be A Fit If You • 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.