CVP, Director - Digital Product Design, Field Productivity - GuideMe

Job Requisition ID:91355

Location Designation:Hybrid - 3 days per week

Business Unit Overview

In Marketing, you'll dive into a world of diverse opportunities, crafting innovative campaigns, managing impactful content, and fostering meaningful connections with key audiences. Collaborate with experts across brand, digital, and strategy, leveraging data and insights to drive decision-making, unlock new growth potential, and optimize our differentiating capabilities.

Role Overview:

We're building the next generation of innovative digital products in our industry, and we're looking for an energetic, proactive Director of Product Design, Field Productivity - Guide Me to lead the charge. The Field Productivity Value Stream is accountable for sales and ongoing relationship management/development experiences and the enabling digital products for our agents and advisors and their staff, our sales support and training teams, and other operations and administrative teammates - all in service of enabling our entrepreneurial agents and advisors to grow their small business, deliver holistic advice and guidance inclusive of the breadth of NYL's products and solutions, and form long-term relationships with and serve them with excellence.

The Field Productivity value stream includes our flagship, proprietary point-of-sale web responsive platform ("GuideMe") to aid agents and advisors to educate our clients with rich content, conduct financial assessments, quantify and visualize financial needs and scenarios, and present a growing range of solutions to fit their needs across a portfolio of NYL solutions. This digital product is a backbone of the selling experience and transformational for our agents, our clients, the company, and the industry.

We're looking for a dedicated player-coach who can execute a strategic vision for NYL, be accountable not only for delivery of near-term experience MVPs, but also part of ambitious visions for industry-leading change. This role blends experience in marketing/education content and storytelling, questionnaire and data entry workflows, quant data manipulation and visualizations and requires an in-depth understanding of financial products.

This role also isn't just about aesthetics-it's about weaving trust, clarity, and empathy into our digital experiences. We believe in ensuring user accessibility/inclusivity throughout all digital journeys. You'll be challenged to work on upholding this mission in every user touchpoint.

"Our team works with dynamic digital products to revolutionize financial services. Every effort impacts millions of people and fuels the dreams of families, the strength of communities, and the stability of generations to come. At New York Life, we don't just build careers; we build legacies." -Kelly Smith, Head of Product Design

What You'll Do:

Design and UX strategy

• Direct UX strategy and product design: Proactively lead processes for UX strategy using human-centered design methodologies, ensuring it meets both business and user needs
• Ensure better experiences and processes: Partner on research with design strategy, UX research, and other insights teams (quant and qual) that supports product design projects
• Tell your design story through compelling visualizations: Use visualizations to articulate the design direction, experience strategy, and research in a variety of storytelling deliverables, including blueprints, personas, prototypes, and more
• Lead meetings and be an expert in industry best practices: Lead reviews and reporting on advancements and emerging industry trends in product design within Life insurance and financial services

Design ops and interaction design

• Visionary leadership for design ops: Establish clear workflows, processes, and goals in partnership with design ops teams to enable consistent deliveries for implementation as part of scaled agile processes
• Manage design roadmaps: Define and manage a design roadmap, backlog, and QA processes that integrates with product management
• Blend thoughtful design with scalability: Balance cost/benefit of product design projects by blending out-of-the-box platform or common front-end libraries with NYL's design system. Develop execution and implementation strategies (e.g., style sheets, tokenization) that prioritize efficiency, scalability, and delivery of experiences, especially for MVP milestones
• Deliver innovative and intuitive design: generate low to high fidelity designs for workflows, componentry, data visualization and interactions, choice design and application of behavioral economic principles, among others
• Champion inclusivity/accessibility: Ensure inclusivity/accessibility in every step of the agent/advisor journey and experiences are up to NYL standards
• Make refining experiences a best practice: Continually test and improve experiences associated with highly regulated business operations, including form design, progressive disclosure, wayfinding, workflows, and dashboards

Leadership and collaboration

• Epitomize player-coach: Be an engaged, proactive product design leader and manage the creation of wireframes, user flows, mock-ups, prototypes, layouts, and UI elements across desktop, mobile, and other viewports directly and through agency and contractor partners
• Be a tireless advocate of your work: Develop and deliver presentations for senior leadership, and lead team meetings, workshops, and brainstorming sessions
• Partner with senior leadership for MVP delivery: Partner widely with department and program leadership, implementation managers, product managers and owners, engineering, and others in the large-scale, multi-year implementation and in-year accelerated MVP delivery

What You'll Bring:

• Portfolio **You must include a portfolio or case studies as a document or link with your resume when applying. Please DO NOT use file sharing software such as Drop Box or Google Docs as we cannot access them.**
• Expertise in Design Principles: Strong understanding of human-centered design principles, interaction design, visual design, and user experience.
• Education: A bachelor's in a relevant field such as Design, Interaction Design, Fine arts, or a related discipline (Master's degree preferred). Equivalent practical experience will also be considered.

Your design experience:

• 10 years or more in product design or UX/UI of complex multi-persona-facing experiences, with at least 5 years in a leadership or management role
• 4 years or more in managing user/design research and testing
• 4 years or more managing usability analysis
• 5 years in financial services industry as a digital / product designer (experience in the fintech innovation space is a plus) including design experiences that emphasize forms and workflows, visualization of financial data, scenarios, and financial products
• Experience with managing multiple projects in a fast-paced, very deadline-driven environment

Your technical abilities include:

• A successful track record of shipping digital experience designs in a Scaled Agile (SAFe) environment across a range of front-ends and platforms (e.g., content management systems, low/no-code platforms, framework-based front ends, native apps)
• Understanding of technical architecture including service-oriented architecture and micro-services, data models, and front-end programming (e.g., HTML, CSS)
• Mastery of design and prototyping tools (e.g., Figma, Adobe Creative Suite) and digital whiteboard/facilitation tools (e.g., FigJam, Miro)
• Understanding of platforms & tools for project management, research / usability testing tools (e.g., Usertesting), experience/session monitoring tools (e.g., ContentSquare), and technical tools and platforms
• Advanced skills in design for and evaluating accessibility within industry standards (WCAG and ADA)

Your leadership and communication style:

• Ability to build relationships with stakeholders: Ability to quickly develop strong relationships with stakeholders, internal teams, and external partners and facilitate and maintain alignment on complex interests.
• Superior communication skills: Ability to leverage your expert communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and executives

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Pay Transparency

Salary Range:$140,000 - $200,000

Overtime eligible:Exempt

Discretionary bonus eligible:Yes

Sales bonus eligible:No

Actual base salary will be determined based on several factors but not limited to individual's experience, skills, qualifications, and job location. Additionally, employees are eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. In addition to base salary, employees may also be eligible to participate in an incentive program.

Our Benefits

We provide a full package of benefits for employees - and have unique offerings for a modern workforce, including leave programs, adoption assistance, and student loan repayment programs. Based on feedback from our employees, we continue to refine and add benefits to our offering, so that you can flourish both inside and outside of work. Click here to discover more about our comprehensive benefit options or visit our NYL Benefits Site.

Our Diversity Promise

We believe in a diverse workforce because it is our mission to advocate for the financial security and success of people in every community. This is why diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are guiding principles that are embedded in our brand and our culture. Click here to learn more about how we have been recognized for our leadership.

Recognized as one of Fortune's World's Most Admired Companies, New York Life is committed to improving local communities through a culture of employee giving and volunteerism, supported by theFoundation.We're proud that due to our mutuality, we operate in the best interests of our policy owners. To learn more about career opportunities at New York Life, please visit the Careers page of www.NewYorkLife.com.