Hiring Manager: Director, Product Design
Location Address: Ontario WFH – gather in office about 1/month in office for team meetings – open to fully remote candidates
Contract Duration: approx. 10 months – ASAP to Oct 31, 2023
Possibility of extension & conversion to FTE
Number of Positions: 1
Schedule Hours: 9am-5pm Monday-Friday; standard 37.5 hrs/week
Reason: BAU support and need for new experimentation squad
Story Behind the Need
Business group: Digital Marketing – Focus on delivering end to end customer experiences across the bank’s footprint. Two-fold business line that oversees Sales/Growth and Customer Experience for Digital Marketing. The bank has a clear and well-supported mandate to transform the way banking technology is delivered, by reimagining the customer experience, fostering innovation to deliver new digital value propositions, and enabling our teams to drive significant changes across the organization and for our customers.
Project: Build an experimentation/optimization squad for web platforms: monitoring experiences that are live on web platforms, on landing pages, monitoring the data – working with BAs, data analysts, PMs to propose enhancements and optimizations in an experimental mindset.
It is a pilot role – currently building a team that is dedicated to tasking experimentation; early days so process is very TBD – will also likely have a scrum team; daily/weekly meetings; it is a very Agile work environment.
Candidate Value Proposition:
The successful candidate will have the opportunity to be part of a bright, dedicated, and cohesive team that highly values personal and professional development: they have weekly activities (that are not mandatory) that help with development such portfolio reviews, critique sessions, community meetings. There are lots of mentorship opportunities; every designer can be assigned a mentor regardless of whether they are FTE or contractor, which would be especially attractive for development in this type of junior role; they promote biweekly conversations between the mentor and mentee. The critique sessions provide an opportunity to receive live feedback on the work done and provide feedback to others in the design team. There are about 100 designers in the team, so it’s a big community to have access to and learn from. The idea is that they want anyone who comes into the team can move forward in their career better off than when they joined; they are passionate about investing in their workforce.
Typical Day in Role:
• Operates within the experimentation/ optimization squad for web platforms, monitoring experiences that are live on web platforms, on landing pages, monitoring data
• Works with a variety of stakeholders including BAs, data analysts, PMS, proposing enhancements and optimizations in an experimentation mindset
• Attends daily stand-ups with the team – discussing projects, assignments, who is working on what, statuses– driven by an Agile framework – about 15-20 minutes – expecting autonomy from the various levels of resources working on the team however if they need help at any point, they will reach out. Being proactive on knowing when to do research, when is the time to socialize an idea from another stakeholders and have self-awareness is key to success in this role.
• Connects to stakeholders for the project being worked on additional to team stand-ups – each project will have a cadence so will have meetings with the project team, could be once every 2 days or daily (whatever the project required); on optimization squad – likely will be meeting daily as well. Expectation that the contractor will take initiative to initiate meetings as needed too.
• Assigned to specific desks or projects as needed: each assignment will have an objective, project statement and points of contact – expectation is not that they proactively monitor to look for bugs or performance as there is also a team of product owners looking at performance, this is really a team assignment working on specific tasks on projects have already been discussed with a more senior team
• Given specific tasks with due dates and managing time with their tasks – most time on 1-2 big tasks, some time on a couple of medium level tasks; and has small ad hoc requests here and there; try to have them work on several at a time when possible.
• Monitoring experiences that are live on web platforms, on landing pages, monitoring the data – working with BAs, data analysts, PMs to propose enhancements and optimizations in an experimental mindset.
The role of Associate Product Designer is focused on someone with skills on both user experience and visual design. The right person for this role is interested in creating experiences that help our customers navigate their finances through the website and all our digital properties. The person will need to be able to fit within a collaborative work environment that encourages ideas and contributions from all team members.
This position holds accountability for conceptual thinking and executing design as follow:
• Influencing experiences that touch 90M+ users every year
• Helping to produce compelling designs to illustrate concepts
• Consume and contribute to a design system, and advocate for its usage
• Understand users, leveraging rigorous design research and usability principles as well as an intuitive design sense
• Meticulously consider user interactions and journeys and act as an advocate for the constant improvement of both
• Help to design site experiences that are accessible to ALL users
• Bring a high level of technical acuity with an understanding of front-end technologies; understand limitations and constraints, as well as when to push boundaries
• Successful, persuasive, engaging and love to have a good laugh – also know when it’s important to get serious and be a champion for the end-user
Candidate Requirements/Must Have Skills:
1) 1+ year of experience as a Product Designer
2) Demonstrated experience with Figma and Adobe Creative Suite
3) Demonstrated experience working with design systems
Nice-To-Have Skills:
1) Experience with design thinking/design research methodologies
2) Experience working with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)
3) Experience working in an Agile environment
4) Experience in reading and understanding data (e.g. being able to read a Google Analytics table)
Soft Skills Required:
• A fast learner who has an appetite to learn what’s behind both simple and complex financial solutions
• A positive and resilient personality. Must be able to embrace feedback and have a desire for continuous iteration and improvement
• Comfortable working within tight timeframes and with working creatively within specific constraints
• Works in a self-guided manner with the ability to prioritize tasks and manage own time efficiently
• Works with teams, stakeholders, and end-user customers
Education:
Post-secondary education in interaction design, human factors, HCI, or a closely related field
Best VS. Average Candidate: A strong designer who has all the requirements listed and are productive; understand and utilize product methodologies well; a proactive self-starter type who can identify problems and design experiences accordingly or know how to research or reach out to others to be able to solve problems efficiently.
Candidate Review & Selection
2 video interviews – same day, back-to-back
1st with HM – 30 mins – background, behavioral, understanding aspirations
2nd with another team member – up to 1 hour – technical interview: portfolio review
Hiring Manager’s availability to interview: ASAP