Senior Service Designer

Primary Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and potentially manage a team dedicated across opportunity spaces; connect to and help evolve broader experience vision, and plan for and keep track of experience evolutions.
• Strategically align service and product efforts towards unified experience visions and opportunity spaces.
• Lead cross-functional teams in design workshops, sprints, and related planning sessions using human-centered and design thinking methodologies.
• Perform user/customer research in partnership with our Experience Research team.
• Translate user/customer insights into opportunity spaces for providing differentiating service experiences, and make recommendations on where teams should place their efforts.
• Strategically choose the service design tools and methods (e.g., journey maps, service blueprints) that best fit the strategic outcomes.
• Help define the model for how service design best practices work together for M&T Bank.
• Organize and collaborate with leads from Product, Process, Finance, Research, Analytics, and Technology.
• Use storytelling and persuasion to build trust with cross-functional peers and establish long-term relationships.
• Advocate for the customer perspective at any level of the organization with confidence and charisma.
• Take an active role in recruiting and hiring new members of the team.
• Understand and adhere to the Company’s risk and regulatory standards, policies and controls in accordance with the Company’s Risk Appetite. Identify risk-related issues needing escalation to management.
• Promote an environment that supports diversity and reflects the M&T Bank brand.
• Maintain M&T internal control standards, including timely implementation of internal and external audit points together with any issues raised by external regulators as applicable.
• Complete other related duties as assigned.

Education and Experience Required:

• Bachelor’s degree and a minimum of 5 years’ technical experience, including a minimum of 3 years’ professional experience in user interface, user experience and/or interaction design,
• Or, in lieu of a degree a combined minimum of 9 years’ higher education and/or work experience, including a minimum of 5 years’ technical experience, with a minimum of 3 years’ professional experience in user interface, user experience and/or interaction design

Leadership Attributes:

• Customer Centric – Outside in perspective with a focus on improving the customer experience
• Curiosity – Seeks out ways to improve the customer experience
• Resilient – Respectful of broad opinions and makes tough calls with ease
• Driven & Prioritization – Self-motivated and knows how to say no
• Challenges assumptions
• Decisive & Lead taking – Sense of urgency with an ability to inspire followers
• Takes Ownership with a strong sense of accountability
• Interdependent – Communicates and convenes others – reaches across boundaries
• Continuously seeks out ways to improve

Education & Experience Preferred:

• Experience creating service blueprints, illustrated journey maps, concept designs, service experience prototypes, empathy maps, and value proposition proposals to communicate ideas and designs to diverse groups of stakeholders
• Hands-on experience designing for a variety of digital touchpoints and non-digital channels and supporting the delivery of those designs
• Experience with conceptualization, ideation, and iterative prototyping, and with employing various methods to prototype service concepts such as staging and role-playing approaches
• Project and people management skills; experience functioning as a project leader as well as an individual contributor
• Strong ability to mentor and educate others on the value and principles of good experience design
• Team player who is comfortable navigating ambiguity within a self-directed culture
• Ability to establish strong working relationships with colleagues, clients, and key stakeholders
• Extensive experience conducting remote and in-person workshops; strong familiarity with supporting tools such as Miro and Webex
• Experience with design and prototyping tools such as Adobe, Sketch, InVision, Figma or other similar tools used widely in the design community
• Proficiency in industry best practices for digital and non-digital products and services
• Experience with accessibility standards, cross-platform issues, mobile user interfaces and systems-thinking 
• Familiarity with design systems
• Experience in financial services industry a plus