Design Lead (6 months)

A Design Lead role at Vanguard to lead a multi-disciplinary team in creating intuitive digital experiences for clients, focusing on content design, product design, and AI-driven efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Your Design skills: Familiar with the gov.uk content guidelines, you know content best practice and you're an expert at writing for accessibility
• Comfortable working with Design Systems (Storybook & Figma) and readily able to build prototypes & designs from these building blocks
• Able execute on the end-end design process from initial framing through to exploration, insights, hypotheses testing and design delivery
• Familiar with, and ideally have experience using, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) for content management, as well as analytics tools such as Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics
• Ability to translate complex financial/investment concepts into simple, plain English language
• Contribute and can lead research activities with research plans, discussion guides, building prototypes and insight synthesis
• Autonomously drive the production of design work and lead the sign-off process with Product, business stakeholders, legal and compliance
• Energetic story teller, able to engage an audience in workshops, facilitate design critiques and co-creation workshops
• Natural partner of Tech, Compliance, Marketing and all key stakeholders
• Proactively engage with your immediate stakeholder group (PM, Marketing, Designers, Developers) but also other relevant SMEs (legal, compliance, business strategy, customer services, etc)
• Understand UX, the Double Diamond and the Agile delivery mindset
• Highly proficient in Figma – this is our workspace and where you’ll need to execute all design work
• Work off hypothesis and problem statements
• Your Leadership Skills: Love to champion our diverse disciplines and skillsets to bring Designers together around client problems and get the best of the team in designing solutions
• Demonstrate servant leadership, your primary approach is to empower & elevate your team and our Design practise to help Vanguard & our clients achieve their goals
• Comfortable giving clear & valuable feedback, demonstrating care & coaching to support Designers in your pod
• Welcome feedback, are a great listener and are able to tune in to your audience to get the best from stakeholders & senior leaders
• Know when to lean in and when to take a step back to empower others
• Comfortable working with vague briefs and have a disciplined approach to creating definition in design requirements
• Able to work across multiple initiatives at once through a balanced project management approach
• Love partnering with other Designers and Leads to come together around problems and ensure alignments and consistency in ways of working
• Able to think strategically about our products to ensure Design can do what it does best and deliver a coherent, consistent, easy & simple experience for clients

Requirements

• Proven experience in the design space (ie, writing for journeys, app, public website, dashboards, etc)
• Experience in finance, asset management or other regulated industries essential
• Experience as either a Senior Designer or Design Lead preferred
• Experience of mentoring and/or coaching others is a must
• Strong work ethic. Demonstrated willingness to contribute to the overall success of the unit and Vanguard

Key Skills

• Content guidelines
• Content best practice
• Writing for accessibility
• Design Systems (Storybook & Figma)
• Prototypes & designs
• End-end design process
• Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)
• Analytics tools (Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics)
• Complex financial/investment concepts
• Research activities
• Sign-off process
• Workshops
• Design critiques
• Co-creation workshops
• Tech, Compliance, Marketing and all key stakeholders
• Immediate stakeholder group
• UX
• Double Diamond
• Agile delivery mindset
• Figma
• Hypothesis and problem statements
• Championing diverse disciplines
• Servant leadership
• Feedback
• Empowering others
• Vague briefs
• Balanced project management
• Partnering with other Designers and Leads
• Strategic thinking