Design Squad Lead (12-Month FTC)

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’ve placed an ambitious transformation programme and a multi-channel approach to banking at the heart of our strategy to be the best bank for customers, backed by significant investment in our platforms and people over the next three years. We serve millions of customers every day, from individuals and families to large businesses and corporations. This means we’re well-placed to help Britain prosper by shaping the way we spend, save and borrow.

About this opportunity

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. Whether that’s advocating for Experience Design with others, defining new ways of working together more effectively or helping evolve the design craft.

As a Design Squad Lead, it will be 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.

About working for us

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 were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative. And it’s why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups. We’re disability confident. So if you’d like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.

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

At Lloyds Banking Group, we’re driven by a clear purpose; to help Britain prosper. Across the Group, our colleagues are focused on making a difference to customers, businesses and communities. With us you’ll have a key role to play in shaping the financial services of the future, whilst the scale and reach of our Group means you’ll have many opportunities to learn, grow and develop.

We keep your data safe. So, we’ll only ever ask you to provide confidential or sensitive information once you have formally been invited along to an interview or accepted a verbal offer to join us which is when we run our background checks. We’ll always explain what we need and why, with any request coming from a trusted Lloyds Banking Group person. We’re focused on creating a values-led culture and are committed to building a workforce which reflects the diversity of the customers and communities we serve. Together we’re building a truly inclusive workplace where all of our colleagues have the opportunity to make a real difference.