Design LEadership

Driving positive change for Designers, Researchers, and the business

My role

As Hiya’s Director of Product Design, I lead a high-performing design and research team that supports multiple products and teams. I’m passionate about guiding and nurturing designers and collaborating with teammates across design, product, and engineering.

I’m also a player/coach, stepping in as needed to lead with hands-on design or help teams accelerate output, meet deadlines, and exceed goals.

Delivering results

• New features and improvements driven by our team routinely solve customer pain points, reduce churn, and generate revenue for the business.

• Our team's research and design efforts tangibly improve the bottom line: "ease of use," design clarity, and "user experience" are frequently cited by customers as valuable differentiators and have been cited by the sales team as sales factors.

• Our team uses customer feedback and research to guide our design work. I've led efforts to implement engagement measurement and user monitoring tools to augment our user understanding when time or research resources are tight.

• Our design and research team supports 3 separate verticals. Together we drive development of multiple successful mobile apps and enterprise web apps while supporting internal product teams and business development.

A few Highlights

• Hiring and growing team members

  • Partnering with our talent team to source and hire great teammates

  • Crafting career leveling documents to clarify expectations and plan for individual growth

  • Regular 1:1 and team feedback sessions

  • Individually-focused mentorship to help teammates achieve their career goals

• Delivering value

  • Shipping products and experiences that move the business forward, like a self-serve account creation flow resulting 4x increase in new monthly paid customers for our B2B SaaS

  • Creating 0-to-1 products like a new AI-based phone app for iOS and Android including leading-edge AI features

• Constant team improvement

  • Implementing new team processes for design and research feedback

  • Evaluating and updating design tools to accelerate output and efficiency

  • Encouraging exploration and usage of AI tools to augment creative exploration

  • Implementing a ticket system and process to help team members track and prioritize their work

  • Empowering designers and researchers to own their work and their successes by creating processes that clarify goals and help them find satisfaction and autonomy

• Driving strategy at an org leadership level

  • Crafting vision docs, strategic roadmaps, and market opportunity reports to coalesce leadership and stakeholders around shared goals and explore what the future could look like for our business

• Contributing hands-on design work

  • Lead designer for the Hiya AI Phone app and Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector Chrome extension

  • Redesigned Hiya Connect, our revenue-leading B2B SaaS product, resulting in increased sales and revenue

  • Created design systems, including Figma component libraries and style guides for our enterprise product and consumer mobile apps

Get in touch

Wanna chat about design leadership or your favorite movies? Send me a message at hi@hichristopher.com or on LinkedIn.