About the Role
Most designers work on experiences. Service designers work on the systems that make experiences possible. At Valley, we are looking for a Principal Service Designer who understands that distinction deeply and who can operate at the intersection of customer journeys, organizational processes, and physical and digital channels to make that system work better for everyone it touches.
This is a senior role with significant organizational influence. Your canvas spans the full Consumer Bank: consumer, small business, and wealth management segments, across every channel Valley operates. That means branch environments and digital products in the same conversation. It means service blueprints that account for what happens backstage as much as what customers experience front of house. And it means bringing a systems thinker’s eye to some of the most complex cross-channel journeys in financial services.
The problems you will work on cannot be solved at the feature level. They require someone who is most energized when untangling a system and redesigning it from the outside in, who can hold the long view while others are heads down in the sprint, and who earns influence through the quality and clarity of their thinking rather than through organizational authority.
What You Will Do
Cross-Channel Journey Design
- Own the end-to-end mapping and redesign of high-priority customer journeys across consumer, small business, and wealth management segments
- Design journeys that work coherently whether a customer starts on mobile, continues in a branch, and resolves through a contact center, treating channel transitions as design problems rather than operational inevitabilities
- Identify the moments where journeys break, stall, or fail customers and build the evidence base for why fixing them matters
- Maintain a living view of Valley’s most critical journeys that can inform product roadmaps, operational priorities, and branch experience investments simultaneously
Service Blueprinting and Systems Design
- Develop detailed service blueprints that connect the customer-facing experience to the people, processes, technology, and policies that enable or undermine it
- Make the invisible visible: surface the backstage complexity that drives front-stage friction and create a shared organizational understanding of how the service actually works versus how it is supposed to work
- Identify systemic failure points that individual product teams cannot see from their vantage point and bring them into focus for leadership
- Build a service design vocabulary and set of artifacts that become the common language for how Valley talks about and improves its customer experience
Physical and Assisted Channel Design
- Bring service design rigor to branch environments, ATM interactions, and contact center experiences, not just digital products
- Partner with Branch Operations, Facilities, and Customer Care leadership to translate service design insights into changes in physical space, staffing models, and assisted channel scripts and flows
- Design for the moments that matter most in physical channels: account opening, problem resolution, advisory conversations, and the transitions between in-person and digital interactions
- Ensure that physical and digital channels feel like parts of a coherent whole rather than separate experiences that happen to share a brand
Organizational Influence
- Work across product, technology, operations, compliance, and business leadership to build shared ownership of the journeys and systems you are designing
- Translate service design artifacts into formats that resonate with non-design audiences, from executive journey narratives to operational change briefs
- Partner closely with the Director of User Research to ensure service design work is grounded in customer evidence, not just process logic
- Mentor and elevate the systems thinking of UI designers and product owners across the organization even without direct management authority
