Senior Director, Digital Product Design

03 Jul 2024

Vacancy expired!

At Northwestern Mutual, we are strong, innovative and growing. We invest in our people. We care and make a positive difference.

We're looking for fresh thinkers, new perspectives and a passion for people. People who choose to make a difference with an innovative mindset and the drive to make things happen. Choose to be a part of an innovative, growing company that's been putting people first for 160+ years.

At Northwestern Mutual, we know the future starts today, with people like you. People with dreams and ambitions. People with a passion for people. People who understand that going the extra mile starts with one small step.

With ongoing training, guidance and mentorship, you'll be given the freedom and encouragement to innovate, the confidence to try and the resilience to try again. With us, you can go anywhere. It's your choice.

When you join Northwestern Mutual you're not just joining a company. You're joining a community. One where you are valued and the choices you make matter.

The choices we make, make us. We also know that our choices define who we are and the impact we have on the world. That's why we actively put our time and resources behind causes you care about and that make a positive difference in others' lives.

We're guided by four important qualities that set us apart:
  • Our Time-Tested Future: We've been strong and growing for over 160 years because we know how to adapt while choosing to stay true to who we are.
  • The Path You Choose: Careers at NM are about choices, not chances. Our people play to win.
  • Promises Are Lived Here: Providing clients with clear direction and confidence in their futures is at the heart of what we do.
  • Trust Is Mutual: Our success is only possible through the integrity of our people.

What's the role?

As Senior Director, Digital Product Design you'll be responsible for driving the design and user experience of the products and services our customers use every day to protect their financial freedom and enable their prosperity. Your leadership will elevate the bar for quality and performance, and deliver impact to the business and user across web and mobile surfaces alike. You'll also mentor, coach, and build your teams, challenge and support your managers of the teams who will deliver your vision, and show them how design careers thrive at NM.

Your ability to sustain and improve partnerships with collaborators, stakeholders, and executive leadership will unlock additional opportunity and prevent risks to your team and the product portfolio. You'll communicate often and clearly where your team is today and where they're going, and also share your vision to your peer leaders in the design organization.

You and your team will advocate for the needs, goals, and motivations of our customers and align those goals with those of the business to show success. This is a management role in which this person will be expected to drive delivery work through other people and not through their direct contribution.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:
  • Define and drive strategic objectives across several customer-facing applications and refining processes that support quality execution.
  • Managing a team of design leaders who will be managing their own smaller teams of individual contributors.
  • Facilitating initiatives based on research insights.
  • Transforming business goals into opportunities for your team to deliver value.
  • Working with design program management to create resourcing plans and schedules and ensure that you have the proper resources for your team.
  • Collaborating with the design system team to develop contributions to the design system based on emergent needs discovered through application designs
  • Facilitating design workshops for the design team and relevant stakeholders, SMEs, and other collaborators
  • Ensuring design's focus is on design quality and the ability to clearly articulate what good looks like via quantitative and qualitative analysis.
  • Collaborating with our key partners (product managers, developers, other designers) to reach aligned and shared outcomes with a common understanding of success.
  • Providing mentorship and coaching to managers, designers and non-designers on the team so they can uplift themselves and the team.
  • Being an ambassador for user-centeredness and the strategic value of design across the enterprise, especially with your cross-functional peers and leadership.
  • Managing the performance day to day of the team: assuring they are engaged, delivering the highest quality work, delivering work on time, considering tradeoffs and constraints, providing multiple options, accounting for accessibility in their designs, and aligned with the strategic direction and objectives of the business.
  • Communicating and collaborating with peers on the Design Leadership team to ensure alignment across design teams.
  • To meet the team's objectives and measure success, coordinate and support the efforts of design services including research, content strategy and program management. Their impact will increase the influence of design across the organization and drive a high-performance culture.

Bring Your Best! What this role needs:
  • Minimum of 10 years of experience in product design
  • Experience working on a diverse set of complex, highly transactional, data intensive digital products & services
  • Experience managing a team of managers, helping them define and reach business outcomes
  • Experience creating goals that are outcome-driven with clear assessment criteria of what success looks like for the team and team's cross-functional partners
  • Demonstrated depth of design skills applied across a breadth of contexts and have implemented partnerships with content strategy, research design operations, product, engineering and business stakeholders
  • Strong advocate for design process and methods, and have experience teaching non-designers how they can make use of them and gain value from their practice for themselves
  • Team developer, helping team members grow as design and business contributors
  • Strategic and outcome oriented, presenting work based on a critical eye to the business
  • Can show both a grounded foundational portfolio of work in product design, and levels of fluency in UX research, content strategy, copywriting, and Product Management
  • Experience and ability to speak to the range of issues and opportunities involved in managing a team of teams, managing different design disciplines to drive strategic success
  • Recognize the demands of leading at an executive level in a large organization, with the specific challenges related to a highly regulated and compliant industry such as finance/banking, insurance or healthcare
  • Ability to use your communications and social skills to influence partners, peers, superiors, and stakeholders, as well as to clearly communicate requirements, requests, and responses
  • Experience articulating the impact of design and evangelizing in order to support your team's goals and help them develop as both individuals and a highly successful team
  • Familiarity with implementing design operations at scale

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Grow your career with a best-in-class company that puts our client's interests at the center of all we do. Get started now!

W e are an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age or status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.

If you work or would be working in Colorado or outside of a Corporate location, please click here for information pertaining to compensation and benefits.

  • ID: #43794679
  • State: New York New york city 10001 New york city USA
  • City: New york city
  • Salary: USD TBD TBD
  • Job type: Permanent
  • Showed: 2022-07-03
  • Deadline: 2022-08-31
  • Category: Et cetera