Design LEader & IC

Product Design / leadership / Strategy / Vision

My role

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

I’m also an individual contributor, driving projects as a lead designer or stepping in to help my team 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.

  • A small but mighty 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

Design Leadership

  • Hiring and nurturing team members by providing career leveling resources, consistent feedback, and individually-focused mentorship.

  • Guided my team in shipping self-serve account creation for our B2B SaaS product, leading to a 4x increase in new monthly paid customers.

  • Mentoring new and veteran designers whenever the opportunity arises. I’m happy to share my experience and knowledge with my teammates, others in the design community, and those who are simply considering design as a profession.

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

  • Launching customer Help Centers for enterprise and consumer products, guiding and collaborating on their support content and providing solutions for our customers to quickly solve problems on their own.

  • Empowering my team to own their work and their successes by creating team processes that clarify goals and help them find satisfaction and autonomy.

  • Leading collaboration across teams and up and down the organization to set goals, define, build, and launch features and products that grow the business in the short- and long-term.

  • A few more things…

    • Created design process documentation

    • Launched a JIRA ticket system and process for my team

    • Implemented design team feedback sessions

Hands-on Design work

  • Lead designer for Hiya AI Phone, a consumer phone assistant app for iOS and Android that launched to the public in Jan 2025

  • Sole designer for Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector, an AI audio analysis browser extension featured in Engadget, Fast Company, PCMag, and more

  • 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.

  • Shipped a cornucopia of new features and data visualizations for our B2B SaaS product, driving revenue and regularly surpassing engagement goals

  • Created user journey maps – in collaboration with our product researcher – and socialized them across the organization to identify opportunities for improvement and encourage new customer experience-focused perspectives

Get in touch

Wanna learn more about my recent IC work or leadership role at Hiya? Send me a message at hi@hichristopher.com or on LinkedIn.