# Design Program Manager

**Company:** [GoHighLevel](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/gohighlevel)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Technical Program Management
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** Program Management, Design Operations, Product Operations, Technical Program Management, Cross-Functional Coordination, Process Improvement, Stakeholder Management, Risk Management, Design Systems, Launch Readiness
**Posted:** 2026-07-08

> Design Program Manager partnering with Product Design leadership to build lightweight operating systems, cadences, and engagement models that improve planning, reviews, launch readiness, and cross-functional coordination while preserving speed in a high-growth environment. Requires 7+ years in design/program/product operations and deep product design understanding.

## Job Description

## 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
- 7+ years of experience in design program management, design operations, product operations, technical program management, or a related role supporting product/design/engineering teams.
- Experience in a high-growth product environment where priorities shift quickly and process needs to serve the work, not dominate it.
- Deep understanding of product design to improve critiques, reviews, design quality rituals, and delivery workflows without being the design decision-maker.
- Excellent at turning ambiguity into operating clarity: agendas, decision logs, milestone plans, dependency maps, status systems, escalation paths, and practical rituals.
- Ability to build trust with designers while being credible with product managers, engineers, researchers, and data partners.
- Strong diagnostic skills to identify whether problems stem from unclear ownership, weak prioritization, poor communication, missing information, unrealistic timing, or design gaps.
- Clear and calm communication, especially during fast movement, uncomfortable tradeoffs, or changing priorities.
- Comfort working at multiple altitudes: shaping engagement models and cleaning up project trackers.
- Strong judgment on when to add structure, simplify, or step back.

## Nice-to-Haves
- 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 improving team communication.
- Experience in B2B SaaS, platform products, multi-product suites, or products serving both SMB and partner/channel customers.

## Similar roles

- [Senior Program Manager, Disaster Recovery](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/ead1afaa-4aa4-4c96-ae5e-f7d690f32d16) - Twilio - Remote - $117k – $172k/yr
- [Technical Deployment Lead, Semiconductors](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/b4c65353-9884-4218-9a22-cb5a3470397f) - OpenAI - San Francisco, CA - $198k – $294k/yr
- [Senior Technical Program Manager, Core Algorithms](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/039c8986-938c-4dda-b8f6-698c10dd6c93) - WHOOP - Boston, MA
- [Senior Program Validation Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/e110ca98-b95e-441c-9ac0-d7408a32b5ac) - Applied Intuition - Sunnyvale, CA - $118k – $200k/yr
- [Strategic Program Manager](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/d7fdf7bd-d7fc-4c42-a120-295c843b3cb0) - Square - California - $123k – $223k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/620a2ed4-e830-4558-baa9-f4d7c426a6f0
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/620a2ed4-e830-4558-baa9-f4d7c426a6f0