Lead Experience Designer - Innovation

At Northwestern Mutual, we are strong, innovative and growing. We invest in our people. We care and make a positive difference.

What's the role?

This Lead Experience Designer will be a part of the Digital Innovation team that works out of the Cream City Labs space in downtown Milwaukee, WI. We work in small cross-functional pods of product managers, engineers, and designers evaluating short-term experiments to help the rest of the company innovate. Your responsibilities within the pod will be to help take an idea, evaluate the opportunity, and develop the experiment to test if it is a viable addition to Northwestern Mutual’s ecosystem. Our ideas are sourced from around the company through employee submissions, hackathons, emerging trends, and senior leadership. If you like variety of projects instead of working on the same product roadmap year after year, this role is for you!

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Working in a fun environment where experimentation isn’t just encouraged it’s a way of life.
• This role differs from many other design roles because innovation investigates projects that have a high degree of uncertainty, so many projects end at the prototype phase before any working software is built.
• Developing experiments and creating designs that support the experiment to target an audience’s problem we are trying to tackle.
• Collaborating with a pod that includes a product manager and engineers to take a project from research all the way to prototype, and possibly a pilot testing phase.
• Incorporate multiple perspectives into mockups & prototypes using best in class tools, methods, and processes.
• You will be working on 1-3 short-term experiments at a time.
• Advanced skills in problem-solving and familiarity with technical constraints and limitations as they apply to designing for platforms such as desktop and mobile, Android and iOS.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity to drive the design cycle and multitask in a fast-paced environment
• Drive usability, accessibility, responsiveness and other properties through design execution.
• We encourage this individual to provide mentorship and coaching to less experienced designers and non-designers on the team. A Lead can be called upon to supervise up to 4 designers.
• Help drive all work through to completion for your own projects and for those you are mentoring.

What this role needs:

• Experienced working on a diverse set of sophisticated, highly transactional, data intensive digital products & services.
• Demonstrate a well-rounded set of digital design skills with primary emphasis on interaction design and information architecture with secondary abilities in graphic/visual design and research.
• Demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of relevant psychological and other social science topics and their application to product design.
• You have worked with applying design systems across a complex array of products and services.
• You are an advocate for design process and methods, and have experience instructing non-designers how they can make use of them and gain value from their practice for themselves.
• You are strategic and outcome oriented and present your work based on a critical eye to the business.
• You have a detailed design process that is responsive to common heuristics and critical principles.
• You are not only proficient in relevant tools of the trade but explore tools & tooling in order to always be ready to switch to the next outstanding tool.
• You use your communication and social skills to influence collaborators, as well as to clearly communicate requirements, requests, and responses.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in a regulated industry like financial/banking, insurance or healthcare.

Benefits:

• Tuition reimbursement, commuter plans, and paid time off
• Highly competitive compensation that include base salary plus bonus
• Medical/Dental/Vision plans, 401(k), pension program, and more!

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W e are an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age or status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.

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