Design Manager
Morningstar is passionate about helping our customers improve their lives through better investing, budgeting, saving, and money management. We reach millions of investors around the world through our products and services. We strive to create beautiful, intuitive, industry-leading software that truly helps people.
We’re looking for a UX Design Manager for Retirement Products. This group builds software that helps employees make the most of their employer-sponsored retirement and incentive plans, helps advisors create and manage investment lineups for these plans, and helps employers offer relevant tools and services amid a rapidly changing legal and financial landscape.
In this role, you’ll be a coach but also a player. You’ll inspire and teach UX and Visual Designers to ask and answer key questions for users and help grow our business. Your daily contributions will demonstrate how that’s done – working with product teams to create intelligent experiences, powered with clear content that are a joy to use. You’ll use your strong UX skills to execute on entire journeys while agonizing over the word choice in a call to action. You’ll rationalize your choices with data, user testing, and your own rich experience.
You’ll routinely check in with stakeholders to keep them in the loop and elevate the contributions of Morningstar designers.
Morningstar's unique culture values design and designers as part of our strategic foundation, alongside our technology and editorial/research peers. We expect a desire to dive deep and connect with data, technology, brand standards, and your teammates. We require a love of elegant interfaces, refined typography, and honestly visualized data where others see only numbers.
We’re looking for someone who’s:
• Passionate about user experience, UI components including content, and coaching talent. Experience in finance or a related field is helpful, but not required.
• Committed to user outcomes, business impact, and measuring both.
• Eager to master complex information, and able to simplify it so that everyone can understand it.
• So familiar with your product subject matter that you know what questions need to be answered during product creation, and you can help others learn to ask and answer those questions without your help.
• Able to offer at least two solutions to every problem. You don’t need hand-holding, and you’re a curious self-starter.
• Able to build meaningful relationships across multidisciplinary teams to cultivate empathy for Design initiatives, while also moving teams quickly toward releasable software through crafting minimum viable products.
• Is experienced with working with design systems and components.
• Thrives in an agile work environment, including the ability to embrace iterative product development while maintaining a cohesive and holistic view of the overall design experience.
• Deeply collaborative and can bring teams together to solve problems.
• Able to adapt their leadership style based on what each contributor needs to thrive. This includes providing art direction and constructive critique from every angle of the experience.
• Able to have hard conversations when necessary around performance and product scope.
• Willing to regularly reflect on your work, and interested in constructive critique of your own communication and coaching.
• Able to keep things positive and clear when communicating.
• Earned at least a Bachelor’s degree and has 7 to 10 years’ experience in designing digital user experiences.
In this role, you’ll:
• Lead and mentor the Retirement product designers to deliver Morningstar data, services, methodologies, and other content to clients and end users.
• Design and oversee existing and future user experiences for Retirement products. This includes helping junior talent understand product requirements to develop wireframes, sketches, diagrams, designs, prototypes with and without clear direction. People will look to you to swiftly synthesize and articulate complex problems, and to generate more than one potential solution.
• Advocate for the internal and external users of our products, tying their goals to business goals through data and user research.
• Effectively manage multiple products, projects, people and deadlines. This includes oversight of remote contractors that we may engage from time to time.
• Maintain rich contacts within a wide swath of products across the company, not just inside Retirement.
• See where Retirement products overlap with other products across the company, and aim for reuse and synergy when appropriate.
• Communicate frequently with stakeholders, including your boss, the Director of Design Operations for Individual Investor and Retirement Products.
• Work in the Chicago office.
• Participate in the larger internal and external Design community by contributing to special interest groups and helping facilitate events/trainings.
• Be an obsessive advocate for user-centered research and for a “design thinking” approach to creative problem solving during the entire development process, including product marketing.
• Participate in user-centered research with customers through interviews, usability testing, usage analysis, and participatory design.
• Use creative facilitation techniques and taking the lead at internal meetings and client meetings/calls to understand the problem space and foster a shared vision of the future.
• Recruit and help retain key Design talent.
• Lead the design team through definition, estimation, and scoping for all design tasks; pushing for accountability at every stage.
• Guide the team in communicating design solutions to development teams through prototypes, detailed specifications, and similar types of communication documents.
• 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.
Morningstar is an equal opportunity employer.