VP, Design

About CoLab

At CoLab, we help mechanical engineering teams bring life-changing products to market years sooner.

CoLab is a cloud based platform purpose built for fast, effective design review. Using CoLab, multiple engineers, designers, and other stakeholders can review designs together and build off one another's feedback. Engineers at companies like Ford, Komatsu, and Johnson Controls use CoLab to review designs faster, prevent mistakes, and build the next generation of innovative products.

About the Role

As VP of Design, you’ll own how CoLab looks, feels, and works, across product, platform, and brand touchpoints. You’ll own all things product design and lead a team of passionate product designers, creating operational clarity, a strong team culture, and maintaining a high bar for quality. In this role, you’ll maintain a bold vision for the design of our product, and push that vision forward even when the path isn’t perfectly clear.

You’ll partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Marketing to ensure design decisions are grounded in user needs and business goals, and work with your team to translate that vision into world class, shippable designs.

If you’re energized by ambiguity, believe the best ideas come from deep collaboration, and care obsessively about how products actually feel to use, this role is for you.

What you’ll do:

• Lead, coach, and grow a team of Product Designers embedded across CoLab’s product development teams, creating an environment of trust, ownership, and continuous improvement

• Work with product to set a clear design vision that supports CoLab’s long-term product and go-to-market strategy

• Build and evolve scalable design standards, systems, and processes that enable speed without sacrificing quality

• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership on roadmap planning and execution

• Hold a high bar for quality and usability as product velocity and technical complexity increase

• Advocate for the user while balancing technical and commercial constraints

• Model CoLab’s values by leaning into hard problems, giving and receiving candid feedback, and collaborating across disciplines to get to the best outcome

• Stay hands-on when needed, reviewing work in Figma, unblocking execution, and jumping in where it matters most

• Push CoLab’s leadership team to think differently about design by bringing ideas we haven’t asked for yet, and backing them up with data and conviction

• Work hand-in-hand with the Brand Design Lead to unify product and brand, so CoLab is cohesive across marketing, platform, and customer touchpoints

Who you are:

• 10+ years of experience in Product Design, with 5+ years in senior leadership roles with strong operational rigor

• A design-first leader you care about design more than almost anyone in the room

• Proven experience designing for B2B SaaS and/or complex technical products

• A track record of building, scaling, and inspiring high-performing Product Design teams

• Strong product thinking - you understand how design choices impact adoption and retention

• Hands-on by nature you still design, still use Figma, and can get into the weeds when the work demands it

• Highly detail-oriented, borderline obsessive about quality, and unwilling to ship things that don’t feel perfect

• Fluency in modern design tools and systems (e.g., Figma, design systems)

• Excited about applying AI to accelerate the design process

Frequently cited statistics show that people who identify with historically marginalized groups are likely to apply to jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. We encourage you to help us break that statistic and apply even if you don’t meet every single qualification - your potential is what matters most to us.