About the Team

Our customers love using HubSpot because it’s a crafted product experience that’s easy to use. Our Design System makes up the building blocks of everything we use to build it. Our current system supports a growing organization of over 2,400 product managers, UXers, and engineers. It’s comprised of over 350 coded components represented in Figma, over 300 product illustrations, comprehensive design and engineering documentation, and a lightweight service process. This team owns developing and evolving this system based on the changing needs of our customers.

About this Role

Our Design System is at an exciting inflection point. The visual language, components, and documentation we created over 7 years ago have helped us through significant growth and scale. But it’s time to make a deep investment in some big, key improvements to truly make it world-class. One of those areas is the components themselves. You’ll have the opportunity to lead this team and the organization into the next generation of the system.

We’re looking for a product minded, results oriented design lead to own and evolve our Design System components. In this role, you’ll:

• Create, own, and drive the roadmap for additions and updates to our foundational design system components
• Partner closely with Engineering to understand and ensure quality implementation and adoption
• Lead the team of designers focused on components in terms of quality, prioritization, and execution
• Own and drive high impact decisions around tradeoffs through clearly documented principles, guidelines, decision making frameworks, and decision logs
• Create and own the process around how folks can contribute to the system at scale
• Represent the Design System team, managing relationships across the entire organization
• Collaborate closely with Design Systems operations on key initiatives and processes

What types of problems will you work on?

• Our product supports a wide variety of use cases across different types of customers (Marketing, Sales, Service, Ops, etc). We need to design components that account for flexibility but remain opinionated. A key challenge will be boiling down complexity into simple ideas with consumable guidance.
• We are committed to our foundational components adhering to our accessibility standards. There are multiple big areas to address here starting with color contrast.
• The Design System gets many requests. We need a good system for focusing on the highest impact component work.
• This team needs to have strong opinions, loosely held. They need to make hard decisions and thoughtful tradeoffs quickly, visibly, and with rigor. Finding the right model for governance, collaboration, and contribution will ensure adoption and adherence to the system.

We’re looking for someone who:

• Has very strong visual and interaction design skills. You have examples of going deep into the details of UI decisions for things like color, grids, patterns, accessibility, or usability. You understand which modern UI trends add value and which are just a fad.
• You’ve coached and critiqued the work of your team to high-quality results through a culture of feeling safe to share and receive feedback.
• Led or managed a small team while contributing to the work. You’ve hired, developed, and managed people in context of the work.
• Has created impact and goal based roadmaps for your team. You’ve prioritized multiple streams of work for your team and guided work to results.
• Has used multiple perspectives and data points to inform decisions and can clearly communicate and explain them. You’ve demonstrated resolving conflicting or competing requirements through effective, data-driven decision making.
• Thinks in systems. You have examples where you’ve applied analytical thinking (breaking things down into smaller pieces) and synthetic thinking (seeing the bigger picture trends amongst the pieces).
• Understands how front end engineering works enough to influence how your designs get implemented and used. You’ve collaborated effectively with engineering to get the best results. Experience working with React and Storybook preferred.
• Has experience designing for complex systems. You’ve designed enterprise software or, preferably, worked on an enterprise design system.

About UX at HubSpot

Our UX team is a passionate and diverse group of more than 250 product designers, content designers, researchers, and design ops folks who build consumer-grade experiences while solving enterprise-level problems. We’re set up to work as equal partners to our peers in product management and engineering. And we design and deliver a crafted experience to our customers by setting a high bar on ease of use. We’re investing deeply in building whole and healthy UX teams across all of our disciplines so we can better solve problems for our customers.

We involve our customers in every step of our development process. And we strive to deliver a B2B product that’s just as easy to use as the best B2C products on the market. When our customers grow, we grow, too!

Want to know more about HubSpot’s design system?

• By the people, for the people: keeping your design system evergreen
• How building a design system empowers your team to focus on people — not pixels
• How to gain widespread adoption of your design system
• By the people, for the people: keeping your design system evergreen
• See all HubSpot UX blog posts

One more thing you should know…

There’s a lot of research showing how marginalized groups of people may not apply for jobs unless they meet 100% (or more!) of the qualifications. We also know that many UX folks come from backgrounds with different experiences that might not seem “standard”—and that’s okay! We really value people who bring unique perspectives and add new knowledge to our team.

You might not feel like you “check all the boxes” as you read this job post, but we hope you’ll apply anyway because we’ll take great care in working with you. 🧡

At HubSpot, we’re invested in helping you grow your career. There are countless ways for employees to learn and skill-up, from master classes to tuition reimbursement, but there is one critical growth opportunity we’re doubling down on: internal mobility. If you’re interested in moving to a new product line, are performing well, and have been in your role for a year, inform your manager that you’re interested in exploring internal roles and apply here. What else you should know:

• You must be in the existing job family and job profile to apply, as this position is for in-department mobility
• The Hiring Manager will respond to you directly with whether or not they will move forward with your candidacy
• If they would like to move forward, they will set up a conversation to explore further
• Please note: Applying to an internal role does not guarantee that you will be interviewed or win the position. Next steps are at the hiring manager’s discretion