Design Squad Lead (12-Month FTC) in Edinburgh

Lloyds Banking Group is the UK's leading bank with over 30m customers and its biggest digital bank, with over 20 million active online customers. We serve millions of customers every day, from individuals and families to large businesses and corporations.

We’re looking for a dynamic experience designer to lead one of our experience design teams in Edinburgh. You’ll be responsible for the design of our new financial advice service – Lloyds Wealth from the start, working across the entire service journey, crafting quality experiences for customers, financial advisors and colleagues.

As a design squad lead, you’ll set up and build a team of designers and researchers from diverse backgrounds. You and your team will partner closely within a cross-functional team of product owners, customer journey managers, brands and marketing managers, legal and compliance experts, and engineers to prioritise, shape, test and ship experience. You’re a people leader and a subject matter expert in design thinking methods, using evidence-based design to influence stakeholders and deliver outcomes for customers and the business.

You’ll also enjoy getting into the work - contributing to all aspects of service and digital product design – from needs definition, journey mapping, blueprinting and storytelling to working in Figma to deliver quality interfaces with your team at pace. You’ll love your craft and enjoy developing others.

As a Design Squad Lead, it’s your role to:

• Work effectively and confidently as part of agile teams to help uncover priorities, visualise outcomes, and deliver epics and features.
• Lead a design squad owning relationships with Senior and Lab Product owners.
• Provide thought leadership with respect to the Experience Design crafts.
• Facilitate workshops and discussions with internal customers, making sure the business context, needs and risks are properly understood, and that key decisions are well informed.
• Communicate with colleagues and internal customers to manage expectations and incorporate multiple perspectives when defining solutions.
• Research and document current-state services and experiences and communicate future-state of services.
• Lead others to make good design decisions, bring the user perspective to the forefront and challenge the validity of constraints.
• Take ownership for your own and others' development and help them to succeed through coaching and mentoring.
• Collaborate closely with other designers, product owners, and engineers.
• Be an active member of the design community to share knowledge, create ideas, and embed principles of design across a range of product, service, and customer journeys.

What you’ll have:

• Ideally, at least 7-9 years of relevant experience design experience as an individual contributor/lead designer.
• Approximately 2-3 years or more experience as a people leader, with responsibilities in hiring, people development, performance management and design management.
• A portfolio of work that evidences skilful application of design methods and best practices that led to experience and behaviour changes that delivered outcomes for business and customers.
• Worked in the financial sector, and understand the ethics, inclusion, risks, policies, control and compliance requirements when designing services.
• A passion and interest for designing financial services and user experiences.

You’ll ideally have:

• An innovative approach to problem solving, and the skill to bring others on the journey with them and encourage their input.
• Exceptional communication skills and prowess in effectively communicating ideas, issues, and implications to senior, technical and non-technical audiences.
• An ability to prioritise and focus on the most valuable pieces of work to deliver.
• A strong practice of service design and digital product design – that is grounded in data and research.
• Experience designing wealth advisory services will be ideal.

Our focus is to ensure we’re inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in all its forms. We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• An annual performance-related bonus
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
• 30 days' holiday, with bank holidays on top
• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

If you’re excited by the thought of becoming part of our team, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you!