Head of Strategic & Service Design

Join us as the Head of Strategic & Service Design and guide our team of 15+ designers and practice leaders helping integrate design as a service to deliver business value across our Personal Banking, Business Banking, Wealth Management, and Deposit products. To use design vocabulary, this role will own and raise the bar on how design contributes across the 'first diamond' of the design spectrum.

In this key role, you'll report to the Chief Design Officer and partner with other design leaders, product, and business teams to drive our design strategy and elevate the service design practice across Macquarie Bank. Further, you'll be responsible for managing the service design team's operations (hiring, performance reviews, processes, coaching etc.), ensuring design excellence, and helping further shape our design culture.

What you'll do:

Design leadership

• You'll lead a multi-disciplinary team of 15-20 designers, with channel or project-aligned practice leads reporting to you, and each of them having their own teams.
• You'll be across all aspects of design management, from hiring and performance management to team operations.
• You will represent the design organisation to senior leaders of the company with clarity and in alignment to the Chief Design Officer's vision.
• You'll work with the other design and research leaders to develop and evolve of our research and testing practice, helping ensure a high bar when generating user insights and gathering feedback.
• You'll use your experience as a leader to support and empower designers to develop their skills and expertise, enabling your direct and indirect reports to grow in their careers and maximize influence and impact.

Best practice

• Contribute to strategic decision making with the rest of design leaders to help define what good looks like from a strategic and service design perspective.
• Lead the execution of design strategy and champion best practice as you guide business teams through the first phase of the design spectrum, and support indirectly, the execution and post-launch success tracking and iteration, in an Agile context.
• Demonstrate and utilise a wide range of tools and techniques from the design thinkers' repertoire, such as lean business canvas, JBTD framework, customer value proposition mapping and so on.
• Work with partners to continuously identify and exploit innovation opportunities across our bank's customer base.

Design & strategy

• Define what the team does and how is engages with our internal stakeholders to help them understand and realise the value of design as a strategic offering.
• Expertise in articulating and measuring the value of design, especially across early-stage business activities.
• Use a system thinking approach to solving complex business problems that are often abstract and ill-defined and use the many levers that design thinking provides to drive clarity, vision, and outcome.
• Own the formulation of a structured approach to help find creative solutions to customer problems that are not linear or incremental but are innovative leapfrogs.

What you'll bring to the role:

• Demonstrable thought and people leadership in strategic design, service design or experience design background. You will have shipped multiple consumer and/or business products and understand what it takes to create exceptional customer experiences.
• Experience with business strategy, defining CVPs, running proof-of-concepts or early-stage prototypes with a consulting mindset.
• Demonstratable experience in helping organisations conceive and launch new products or services based on a deep understanding of customer needs, business context and the market landscape.
• You are a synthesizer; you can deal with large amounts of information and use a variety of tools and techniques to help others make sense of it.
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative and respectful approach to leading a team. You'll have proven experience consistently demonstrating credibility in cross-functional interactions.
• A user and data-focused design mentality and commitment to design excellence, constantly looking to hone your team's instincts through user feedback and data insight. You understand the role and importance of qualitative and quantitative methodologies.
• An MBA or a higher degree in business/strategy is preferred.

If this sounds like you, please send your CV and a portfolio link. We'd like you to be able to show your abilities through an interview process that is tailored for design leaders. Besides interviewing with key stakeholders, you'll have the opportunity to present your work through as a case study that will focus on showcasing experience where you have previously led similar capability and delivered clearly demonstratable business value.

Design at Macquarie Bank

The design function and Macquarie, headed by our Chief Design Officer, helps envision and deliver how customers experience our various products and services across multiple digital channels. We span across the full design spectrum, from early-stage conceptual design and research to delivering pixel-perfect interfaces on our digital platforms. We follow a human-centered, data-led approach to design and seek to win by collaborating with our partners and helping deliver exceptional customer experiences as a team.

About Banking and Financial Services

Banking and Financial Services is Macquarie's retail banking and financial services business, providing a diverse range of personal banking, wealth management, business banking and vehicle finance products and services to retail clients, advisers, brokers and business clients.

Our commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

The diversity of our people is one of our greatest strengths. An inclusive and equitable environment enables us to deliver innovative and sustainable outcomes for our people, clients, shareholders and communities. From day one, you'll be encouraged to be yourself and supported to perform at your best. If our purpose of 'empowering people to innovate and invest for a better future' is as inspiring to you as it is to us, please apply. With the right technology, support and resources, our people can work in a range of flexible ways.

We are committed to providing a working environment that embraces and values diversity, equity and inclusion. We encourage candidates to speak with a member of our recruitment team if you require adjustments to our recruitment process to support you, and the type of working arrangements that would help you thrive.

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