Morningstar’s mission is to create great products that help investors achieve their financial goals. For our Workplace Solutions business, that means building products and services that help employers maximize the value of their workplace retirement plans and put individuals on the path to better retirement outcomes. Our clients include retirement plan providers, plan sponsors, plan consultants, and retirement plan advisors. By constantly evolving our solutions to solve our clients’ problems, we also help individuals achieve a better retirement. The Workplace Design team is critical to achieve our mission to empower investor success and to bring that mission to life through designing great experiences for our products and services.

We’re looking for a Design Director for Workplace Products. This group builds software and investment products that help employees make the most of their employer-sponsored retirement and incentive plans, helps plan providers differentiate their offerings, helps advisors create and manage investment lineups for these plans, and helps employers offer relevant tools and services amid a rapidly changing regulatory landscape.

Morningstar’s culture values design and designers as part of its strategic foundation, alongside our technology and editorial/research peers. We expect a desire to dive deep and connect with data, technology, brand standards, product, and your teammates. We require a love of elegant interfaces, refined typography, and the ability to visualize complex data in ways that inspire investor trust and confidence

Responsibilities

• As a senior member of the Workplace Solutions business unit, you will need to foster communication and maintain alignment between cross-functional stakeholder teams on business priorities and objectives as well as on resource use and working methods. Stakeholders include leaders in product management, technology, marketing, sales, client support, and compliance.
• You will need to partner with product, technology and business leaders to help set product strategy, determine how we will go to market, and align development roadmaps that consider institutional client needs, end-user needs, business goals, and budget/resource constraints. You will be responsible for aligning design team contributions with those priorities and for fostering awareness across the Workplace business of how designers are advancing our objectives.
• As most products that Workplace offers are a through a complex B2B2C business model, you will need to develop and maintain a deep understanding of the full range of types of users representing our client base—including user needs of institutional clients and their business objectives—and understand the marketplace in which we operate.
• As a member of the Senior Design Leadership Team, you will need to foster and maintain alignment with colleagues in other business units to ensure Workplace product designs are appropriately consistent with other Morningstar products, ensure participation in continuous improvement of the Morningstar Design System, and that the Workplace product design team is managed and developed with consistency across the design organization.
• Lead design teams for existing and future user experiences for all Workplace products. This includes clear and concise product requirements and product experience value propositions as well as associated process artifacts (wireframes, sketches, diagrams, designs, prototypes). People will look to you to swiftly synthesize and articulate complex problems, and to generate solutions.
• Effectively lead multiple products, projects, people and deadlines to align design resources to the most pressing business priorities. This includes oversight of remote contractors that we may engage from time to time.
• Be an obsessive advocate for user-centered research and for a “design thinking” approach to creative problem solving and serve as a resource/sounding board for user testing for marketing and product leaders When required, apply these methods to help our teams understand not only retirement plan participant needs but also the needs expressed by our institutional partners.
• Provide design support to marketing and business teams as needed.
• Ensure that we are learning and validating our product value and business strategies through appropriate user-centered research techniques and continuous measurement.
• Be curious about new technology and pushing experiences to be current and modern.
• Be able to write and present effectively; you’ll need to guide and persuade many opinions.
• Be willing to learn the retirement business if not already familiar with this industry.
• Recruit and retain high performing talent.

Experience Requirements
Bachelor’s degree in design, HCI or other related field and 10 to 15 years’ experience in designing digital user experiences.

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