Lead Service Designer

What’s the role?

A strategist role in the Enterprise Experience Design (EXD) team is a pivotal design role. The Lead Experience Design Strategist takes a holistic view of the end-to-end series of touchpoints and interactions involved in the Northwestern Mutual brand experience. This person will work with Product Designers and internal business partners to make sense of the dynamics of how human interactions with systems and processes inform and shape the front stage experiences for clients, field representatives, and home office employees.

You will adapt to problem finding AND problem-solving and using these insights to guide the design and execution of Northwestern Mutual’s service experience. This role requires the ability to zoom in to see AND communicate user insights and process breakdowns, and zoom out to help craft strategy/s that deliver competitive-advantage in the way Northwestern Mutual serves it, clients. This role is unapologetically human-centered. This role understands the trade-offs between efficiency and usability and can facilitate the understanding of these trade-offs to teams and those responsible for change. Lastly, the person in this role has experience applying the methods and principles of lean process improvement, learning and development, design thinking and managing change to create forward-looking experience design principles.

What you’ll be doing:

• Fostering partnerships and collaborating with business-stakeholders to meet key business outcomes and craft highly relevant end-user experiences.
• Helping teams see the relationship between people, processes, and systems and the moments of truth they create and apply a depth of knowledge around this.
• Informing (guiding and shaping) the work of Design teams with insights about NM’s end-to-end experience for customers, partners, and employees.
• Working with our Design and Research team to author meaningful insights execution plans.
• Develop and prioritize initiatives with understood learning and business objectives based on data-informed insights.
• Facilitate co-creation workshops with relevant partners, SMEs, and other collaborators.
• Act as a design ambassador to the broader organization.
• Help the design team and product owners see around corners using foresight.

Bring Your Best! What this role needs:

• Build and manage relationships with process and initiative owners.
• Ability to navigate a large complex organizational culture.
• Comfort with both problem finding and problem solving.
• Able to translate metrics and performance criteria into design principles and criteria.
• Be analytical, insightful, and strategically informative.
• Comfortable and experienced in navigating people, processes, and systems.
• Respectful of the tension between performance and transformation.
• Able to point out blind spots and interdependencies.
• Be strategic and results-oriented and present your work based on a critical eye to the business

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience directly mentoring people, process and systems architecture
• Experience in a regulated industry like financial/banking, insurance, &/or healthcare
• Experience designing / contributing to client journey maps and service blueprints