VP, User Experience and Design Innovation (Remote Eligible)

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Lead, evolve, and articulate a bold, user-centered vision for the future of design and user experience across Smartsheet's product portfolio and external systems.
• Own and scale research, design, design systems, content, localization, and AI-first design strategy across all product lines and geographies.
• Build, mentor, and grow a team of senior functional and design leaders; scale and evolve the org in alignment with company growth, with a focus on developing and retaining the team you inherit. Develop career paths and programs tailored to individual team member professional development.
• Own experience quality standards, including accessibility compliance, and hold the line when work is below bar, even under delivery pressure.
• Set organizational strategy around design maturity, AI adoption, design systems adoption, and cross-functional design-led decision-making across product, engineering, and business teams.
• Build, evolve, and scale UX processes, standards, and tools, owning the AI agenda for the org by identifying and driving high-impact opportunities to embed AI into research, design systems, content/localization, and the software development lifecycle, while setting standards that protect research rigor and design quality in AI-assisted work.
• Work closely with executive leadership, product, engineering, and go-to-market teams to define strategy and ensure UX and AI-forward thinking are embedded in critical business decisions.
• Elevate UX’s strategic voice alongside product and engineering, and ensure design, research, content, accessibility, and globalization have equal standing within the org.
• Establish and own key metrics tying design and AI initiatives to user satisfaction, adoption, retention, revenue outcomes, delivery velocity, and experience quality; regularly review and communicate progress.
• Translate business goals into innovative, creative, and engaging product experiences.
• Own content strategy and localization approaches across all product lines.

You Have:

• 15+ years of experience in a highly cross-functional role running strategic projects from idea through implementation.
• 15+ years leading and building UX, design, research, or content organizations, including experience as a manager of managers with P&L responsibility, and sustained leadership tenure through organizational transformation.
• A track record of building and scaling high-performing, multi-disciplinary teams (research, design, design systems, content, localization, engineering-adjacent functions).
• Experience building team culture and psychological safety across a remote, globally distributed organization.
• Demonstrated experience driving AI adoption within a design, research, content, or software delivery organization not just using AI tools individually, but setting org-wide AI strategy.
• Deep expertise in research methodologies, design strategy, content strategy, and localization best practices for global B2B SaaS platforms.
• A track record of ensuring customer insights directly inform product strategy, not just validate it.
• Working knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG) and experience shipping compliant enterprise software.
• Experience leading enterprise SaaS products with complex user workflows, multi-stakeholder environments, and mission-critical use cases.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted software development practices and how they change the design-to-engineering handoff.
• Experience finding simple, innovative solutions for complex problems, and facilitating research to uncover user needs.
• Strong visual design sense; design fluency sufficient to critique and direct design work at the strategic level.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills; ability to influence across Product, Engineering, and executive leadership.
• Ability to articulate design decisions and advocate for the user, while balancing speed and innovation enabled by AI.