Overview:

As a Design Lead on the Design Capability team within the Customer Experience Organization, you will be part a dedicated team of designers, strategists and leaders who are building a community of practice for design to support an enterprise-wide initiative to deepen customer centricity throughout the bank. You will lead and organize efforts that support the execution of its strategy, foster the development and adoption of design practices, implement innovative offerings that support customer-centric mindsets and practices. 

We are looking for creative problem solvers who are experienced change leaders within organizations. Flexibility, adaptability and a learners mindset are critical to your ability to excel and deliver value.  We also are looking for teammates ready to collaborate with business leaders across the Enterprise with the ability to connect dots will accelerate our ability to reach employees across the company.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Program Strategy Development: Participate in and contribute to quarterly routines where team aligns on outcomes and develops a shared roadmap for execution

• Design & Development of Offerings: Create or iterate on offerings prioritized through the strategy development process, using an agile, design-thinking approach

• End User Experience Design: Design and facilitate overarching experiences for key stakeholder groups within the customer experience community at M&T that help them learn, develop, and plug in to what we have to offer

• Iterative Improvement & User Feedback: Conduct end user interviews and devise other means to measure desirability, viability and feasibility of new offerings or iterative improvements to existing offerings

• Vendor Relationship Management:  Manage relationship with vendors to support increased adoption of vendor offerings within M&T, introduce new offering features to the community and otherwise maximize the value of third-party applications used to support design, process improvement and other customer experience practices.  In the case of new vendor exploration, partner with procurement team to lead vendor selection process.

• Subject Matter Contributor: Serve as a subject matter expert in one or more design craft areas (e.g. service design, user research, product design, process design) so that others can develop offerings that will promote craft best practices

• Experience Facilitator: In certain situations, facilitate workshops or training sessions with members of the M&T community related to customer experience, design or other related topics.

• Dot Connector & Integrator: Collaborate with other teams focused on building capabilities, leading change or activating the organization in new ways.  Identify points of connection across teams and find creative ways to integrate and synthesize offerings across teams.

Education and Experience Required:

• Bachelor's degree and a minimum of 5 years’ experience in design operations, design strategy, organizational design or psychology, program/project management, or similar

• In lieu of a degree, combined minimum of 9 years education and/or relevant work experience

• Experience in the creation, roll-out, and change management of team-wide programs and processes

• Strong analytical, problem solving, and critical thinking skills with a process-oriented mindset

• Strong attention to detail and organization skills, with the ability to manage many cross-functional initiatives at the same time, within a matrixed organization

• Prioritize well, know when to focus on current state diagnosis, capability building, partnerships with executive staff and HR leadership team

• Foresight to anticipate complex, cross-functional problems, and ability to identify critical elements, variables, and alternatives to develop solutions

• Sees obstacles as an opportunity to solve problems, rather than as issues without a solution

• Team player who is comfortable navigating ambiguity within a self-directed culture

• Flexible mindset and responsive to a changing environment

• A partner who can build effective relationships with people outside of our department, like HR and other communications teams

• Strong familiarity with remote and in-person collaboration tools such as Miro and Webex

Preferred Skills/Experience:

• Knowledge of adult learning theory

• Experience with change theory and change management discipline

• Experience with instructional design

• Previously held roles as a User Experience Designer, Service Designer, Product Designer, or similar

• Experience working with and managing external vendor relationships

• Experience using design and prototyping tools such as Adobe, Sketch, InVision, Figma or other similar tools used widely in the design community

• Understanding of design practices and methodologies

• Familiarity with design systems

Work Arrangement:

• As the Experience Team for a community bank, we believe that our “office” may be anywhere our customers and employees live, work and play.  So while our team members may not be required to come into an office on a set schedule, we are expected to engage in purposeful, in-person collaboration and to be active participants in the M&T community and the communities we serve.  This may require quarterly to monthly travel within the M&T Bank footprint.

• This will be a hybrid position (part in-office/part remote) that includes time spent working in-office at an M&T Bank office location, preferably in the Buffalo, NY, New York, NY, Boston, MA, Bridgeport, CT, Baltimore, MD, or Wilmington, DE areas.  Depending upon the location of the final candidate and the needs of the team the position might be hybrid or possibly remote within the M&T Bank footprint (CT, DE, ME, MD, MA, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT, VA or DC), with travel required as referenced above.

Location