Design Lead

The opportunity At Vanguard, we’re passionate about giving UK investors the best chance of investor success. We do this by creating intuitive digital experiences that inform, compel, and delight our clients. In this role, you’ll be working in and leading a specific value stream within our customer’s end to end lifecycle. You’ll be collaborating with a multi-disciplinary team (Product Manager, Content Designer, Data analysts, UX researchers, scrum teams). Your job will involve understanding what our clients need/want, solve problems and design compelling client experiences. As a Design Lead you’ll be leading a multi-disciplinary pod - with all the individuals & skills needed to execute design. You’ll need a great blend of Content Design & Product Design skills to be effective in this role. Leveraging AI to drive Design efficiency in our design workflow is a must - but we are not looking specifically for an AI Designer. The role of a Design Lead is player-coach. This is a hands-on role where you’ll still need to work as a contributor as well as guiding your Design pod and managing the workflow. This will include some lightweight project management to support the Pod. While you won’t line manage Designers (all Designers report to the Head of Design) you’ll operate as a key person in the Design leadership team. Helping shape ways of working, strategic thinking and the future direction of the team.

The opportunity

At Vanguard, we’re passionate about giving UK investors the best chance of investor success. We do this by creating intuitive digital experiences that inform, compel, and delight our clients. In this role, you’ll be working in and leading a specific value stream within our customer’s end to end lifecycle. You’ll be collaborating with a multi-disciplinary team (Product Manager, Content Designer, Data analysts, UX researchers, scrum teams). Your job will involve understanding what our clients need/want, solve problems and design compelling client experiences.

As a Design Lead you’ll be leading a multi-disciplinary pod - with all the individuals & skills needed to execute design. You’ll need a great blend of Content Design & Product Design skills to be effective in this role.

Leveraging AI to drive Design efficiency in our design workflow is a must - but we are not looking specifically for an AI Designer.

The role of a Design Lead is player-coach. This is a hands-on role where you’ll still need to work as a contributor as well as guiding your Design pod and managing the workflow. This will include some lightweight project management to support the Pod.

While you won’t line manage Designers (all Designers report to the Head of Design) you’ll operate as a key person in the Design leadership team. Helping shape ways of working, strategic thinking and the future direction of the team.

**Core Responsibilities**

**Your Design skills**
- You’re familiar with the gov.uk content guidelines, you know content best practice and you’re an expert at writing for accessibility
- You’re comfortable working with Design Systems (Storybook & Figma) and readily able to build prototypes & designs from these building blocks
- You’re able execute on the end-end design process from initial framing through to exploration, insights, hypotheses texting and design delivery
- You are 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
- You have the ability to translate complex financial/investments concepts into simple, plain English language
- You contribute and can lead research activities with research plans, discussion guides, building prototypes and insight synthesis
- You autonomously drive the production of design work and lead the sign-off process with Product, business stakeholders, legal and compliance
- You’re an energetic story teller, able to engage an audience in workshops, facilitate design critiques and co-creation workshops
- You’re a natural partner of Tech, Compliance, Marketing and all key stakeholders
- You proactively engage with your immediate stakeholder group (PM, Marketing, Designers, Developers) but also other relevant SMEs (legal, compliance, business strategy, customer services, etc)
- You understand UX, the Double Diamond and the Agile delivery mindset
- You’re highly proficient in Figma - this is our workspace and where you’ll need to execute all design work
- You work off hypothesis and problem statements

**Your Leadership skills**
- You 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
- You demonstrate servant leadership, your primary approach is to empower & elevate your team and our Design practise to help Vanguard & our clients achieve their goals
- You’re comfortable giving clear & valuable feedback, demonstrating care & coaching to support Designers in your