Manager, UX Design & Research Operations

If you're passionate about helping a Fortune 100 company with nearly $70 billion in annual sales drive their strategy forward through innovative product development and advancing strategic partnerships to protect customers, then Nationwide is the place for you! At Nationwide®, "on your side" goes beyond just words. Our customers are at the center of everything we do and we're looking for associates who are passionate about delivering extraordinary care.

Nationwide is seeking a Manager, UX Design & Research Operations to lead the operational backbone of our design and research practice. This role is critical to scaling user experience excellence across Nationwide’s digital ecosystem, ensuring that our design system and research operations deliver consistent, accessible, and high-quality experiences for our UX designers and researchers, as well as our Technology partners.

As the leader of the Nationwide design system delivery team, you will drive operational rigor, foster collaboration across Design and Design Engineering, and enable global teams to adopt best-in-class UX practices. This is an opportunity to shape the future of design operations at Nationwide, influencing how we deliver innovative, AI-powered, and inclusive experiences at scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead and manage the design system delivery team (Designers, Design Engineers), as well as the Research Operations Coordinators and Researchers, providing day-to-day direction, prioritization, and coaching.
• Run the operational cadence for the design system (intake, backlog grooming, sprint planning, status/scorecards), ensuring continuous delivery of new components, enhancements, and defect fixes across our many supported platforms.
• Partner with the Practice Leads to translate enterprise priorities into a clear, sequenced roadmap for Design & Research Operations (onboarding, accessibility, research support, participant recruiting, tooling, AI-powered UX, and global UX enablement).
• Coordinate work with the Nationwide India Office (NIO) by standing up shared workflows, onboarding programs, and governance so offshore UX and engineering teams can adopt our design system, research tools, and UX practices consistently, with clear SLAs, rituals, and feedback loops.
• Drive DesignOps and ResearchOps maturity and governance by standardizing processes, documentation, metrics, and quality checks that amplify the value of Bolt and UX research, ensuring consistency, accessibility, and compliance at scale.
• Provide people leadership and talent development for Bolt designers, UI engineers, Research Ops coordinators, and at least one researcher, including performance management, growth planning, and hiring to support an expanding portfolio of 200+ applications and ~100+ designers and researchers consuming our design system and ReOps services.

Requirements

• Experience: 5+ years in UX, Design and/or Research Operations, or related fields, with at least 1 year in a leadership or management role.
• Skills: Strong understanding of design systems, UX research operations, and agile delivery practices; ability to manage cross-functional teams and complex workflows.
• Technical Knowledge: Familiarity with design tools (Figma), research platforms (Dscout, User Interviews), component libraries, accessibility standards (WCAG), and collaboration platforms (Jira); experience preparing design systems and operations for AI‑enabled workflows (e.g., machine‑readable components/tokens, design‑to‑code accelerators, AI‑assisted design and research tooling).
• Leadership: Proven ability to coach and develop talent, foster collaboration, and drive operational excellence.
• Communication: Exceptional ability to translate strategic priorities into actionable plans and communicate effectively with stakeholders across design, engineering, and product.
• Global Collaboration: Experience working with distributed teams and managing workflows across multiple time zones.

This role does not qualify for employer-sponsored work authorization. Nationwide does not participate in the Stem OPT Extension program.

Due to the nature of this role, candidates need to be hybrid to the Columbus offices.

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Job Description Summary

Do you have a keen understanding of the value that human-centered design provides in achieving strategic objectives and can you articulate that value to cross-functional teams and business partners? If you’re capable of leading teams through the design process to distill complex problems into clear solutions that exemplify standard methodologies and encourage others, then we want to know more about you!

As a manager in our User Experience (UX) organization, you’ll lead a team to drive the delivery