Senior User Experience (UX) Lead- Service Design Lead- Remote/Buffalo/Wilmington

Senior User Experience (UX) Lead - Service Design Lead

Location: Buffalo, NY or Wilmington, DE or Remote

Basic Function:

As the Service Design Lead on the M&T Experience Design & Innovation team, you will lead and organize product and service design and delivery efforts. We're looking for an experienced creative systems thinker who has the ability to flex across levels of altitude within the enterprise to solve for both tactical design problems and strategic business opportunities.

Overview:

The M&T Experience Design & Innovation team is a dedicated team of designers, developers, strategists, and leaders who believe in the transformative power of customer centricity. We believe that focus on craft and advocacy for the customer as truth are keys to building differentiated, innovative experiences. We lead by example - staying curious, doing the work, and challenging assumptions at every turn. We're bold enough to believe that great design can exist at a bank, and that it can be a catalyst to bettering the lives of our customers and the communities we share with them. Our mission: Combine deep human understanding with the bank's full suite of capabilities to provide personal, connected, and surprisingly simple banking experiences that help our customers achieve their financial goals.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and potentially manage a team dedicated across opportunity spaces; connect to and help evolve broader experience vision, and plan for and keep track of experience evolutions.
• Strategically align service and product efforts towards unified experience visions and opportunity spaces.
• Lead cross-functional teams in design workshops, sprints, and related planning sessions using human-centered and design thinking methodologies.
• Perform user/customer research in partnership with our Experience Research team.
• Translate user/customer insights into opportunity spaces for providing differentiating service experiences, and make recommendations on where teams should place their efforts.
• Strategically choose the service design tools and methods (e.g., journey maps, service blueprints) that best fit the strategic outcomes.
• Help define the model for how service design best practices work together for M&T Bank.
• Organize and collaborate with leads from Product, Process, Finance, Research, Analytics, and Technology.
• Use storytelling and persuasion to build trust with cross-functional peers and establish long-term relationships.
• Advocate for the customer perspective at any level of the organization with confidence and charisma.
• Take an active role in recruiting and hiring new members of the team.
• Understand and adhere to the Company's risk and regulatory standards, policies and controls in accordance with the Company's Risk Appetite. Identify risk-related issues needing escalation to management.
• Promote an environment that supports diversity and reflects the M&T Bank brand.
• Maintain M&T internal control standards, including timely implementation of internal and external audit points together with any issues raised by external regulators as applicable.
• Complete other related duties as assigned.

Education and Experience Required:

• Bachelor's degree and a minimum of 5 years' technical experience, including a minimum of 3 years' professional experience in user interface, user experience and/or interaction design,
• Or, in lieu of a degree a combined minimum of 9 years' higher education and/or work experience, including a minimum of 5 years' technical experience, with a minimum of 3 years' professional experience in user interface, user experience and/or interaction design

Leadership Attributes:

• Customer Centric - Outside in perspective with a focus on improving the customer experience
• Curiosity - Seeks out ways to improve the customer experience
• Resilient - Respectful of broad opinions and makes tough calls with ease
• Driven & Prioritization - Self-motivated and knows how to say no
• Challenges assumptions
• Decisive & Lead taking - Sense of urgency with an ability to inspire followers
• Takes Ownership with a strong sense of accountability
• Interdependent - Communicates and convenes others - reaches across boundaries
• Continuously seeks out ways to improve

Education & Experience Preferred:

• Experience creating service blueprints, illustrated journey maps, concept designs, service experience prototypes, empathy maps, and value proposition proposals to communicate ideas and designs to diverse groups of stakeholders
• Hands-on experience designing for a variety of digital touchpoints and non-digital channels and supporting the delivery of those designs
• Experience with conceptualization, ideation, and iterative prototyping, and with employing various methods to prototype service concepts such as staging and role-playing approaches
• Project and people management skills; experience functioning as a project leader as well as an individual contributor
• Strong ability to mentor and educate others on the value and principles of good experience design
• Team player who is comfortable navigating ambiguity within a self-directed culture
• Ability to establish strong working relationships with colleagues, clients, and key stakeholders
• Extensive experience conducting remote and in-person workshops; strong familiarity with supporting tools such as Miro and Webex
• Experience with design and prototyping tools such as Adobe, Sketch, InVision, Figma or other similar tools used widely in the design community
• Proficiency in industry best practices for digital and non-digital products and services
• Experience with accessibility standards, cross-platform issues, mobile user interfaces and systems-thinking
• Familiarity with design systems
• Experience in financial services industry a plus

Location

Buffalo, New York, United States of America