Design LEadership

Growing Designers, Researchers, and the business

My role

As Hiya’s Director of Product Design, I lead a high-performing team of 7 designers, researchers, and product support staff that contributing to every team and product in the company. I’m passionate about guiding and nurturing my team and collaborating with teammates across product, engineering, and leadership.

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 highlighted by the sales team as sales factors.

  • Customer feedback and research guide design work and planning. I've implemented tools like Pendo and Hotjar to measure and monitor user engagement and fortify our understanding of where users find success with our products or encounter gaps in their experience.

  • 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.

  • Expanding the footprint of user-centered experiences, I kicked off and lead an effort to overhaul Hiya’s product support function focused on metrics, automation, and tools that solve customer problems quickly.

A few Highlights

Hiring and growing team members

  • Partnering with our talent team to source and hire for design, research, and product support staff

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

  • Regular 1:1 feedback and team design critiques

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

  • Glowing feedback for my team from their cross-functional partners

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 assistant features

Constant team improvement

  • Implementing new team processes for design and research feedback

  • Evaluating and updating design tools to accelerate output and efficiency

  • Leading exploration and usage of AI tools to “skip” busywork and increase velocity

  • 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 (NSMs, OKRs, and other acronyms) 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

  • Led design 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.