UX Design Operations Director

Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.

Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.

As the Director UX Design Operations, you will report to the EPW Head of Marketing and UX and partner closely with the Head of Consumer Product. This person will sit on the UX Design & Content Strategy Leadership team and be responsible for managing effective operations and documentation for a growing UX design and UX content organization. This role requires exceptional attention to detail, the ability to manage complex design review processes, and strong communication skills across multiple cross-functional teams, including design, content/copy, project management, and marketing, to ensure seamless collaboration and efficient workflows to help teams innovate and ideate faster. Key partners include product marketing, brand marketing, UX/UI design, product management, and project management.

What you will do:

• Oversee UX/UI design team operations.  Create systems and standards for ensuring high-quality deliverables, versioning, daily ops and adherence to timelines.
• Communicate and gain alignment.  Align with Workplace and Personal Wealth product and marketing design teams.  Ensure product and marketing counterparts are providing proper briefs and delivery expectations are well documented and agreed upon.
• Lead allocation of design resources and skillsets to projects.  Work with the Product leadership to understand project needs.  Assign resources based on skillsets, level of effort assumptions and prioritization to reduce waiting times to kick off projects and ensure efficient use of these shared resources. 
• Managing design reviews.  Work with Heads of Product and Marketing and their leads to drive efficient design, content strategy and copy review for all Workplace and Personal Wealth user experience initiatives.   Manage and optimize design versioning to reduce cycle times.
• Standardize and optimize design processes.  Create an internal team and cross-functional design review process that enables collaboration, continuity and reuse of designs when applicable.  Identify friction areas in the design process and work with Head of Product to improve cycle times.  Identify and fix inefficiencies in our current design process so we can move and ship experiences faster.
• Managing Design Quality.  Document and operationalize standards and principles to ensure design continuity and quality across all experiences. Support Product Managers and Designers with QA/QC of prototypes to enforce standards.
• Job Logs & Project Documentation.  Create and manage a centralized job log as a central repository of all design projects, where they are in their process and when the next reviews will be ready. 
• Design & Content System Documentation & Governance.  Maintain a running log of where our design system has been updated across Empower’s ecosystem / site map.  Work with Engineering to manage backlog of design system implementation across all experiences. 
• Legal and Compliance Reviews.  Work with legal and compliance team to streamline legal and compliance reviews, reducing time to market.

What you will bring:

• 9-12 years of UX design and/or design operations or project management experience in a highly matrixed, dynamic environment; 6-8 years in direct supervisory management role
• Exceptional Design Ops (operations management, process design) and project management skills; Experience managing in a regulated environment
• Creative problem-solving in a high-energy cross-functional environment
• Strong experience collaborating with cross-functional partners in UX (designers, researchers, content strategists) and marketing (product marketing, brand marketing, performance marketing) as well as product managers and developers
• Skilled with Figma, Workfront, Jira and/or equivalent design and project management tools
• Financial services industry knowledge preferred
• Bachelor’s degree in related fields (Visual Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Project Management, Psychology, Communications, Sociology, or related), or equivalent experience

What will set you apart:

• MBA or Advanced degrees a