We’re looking for a Head of Design for our Investment Management team.  Guided by Morningstar’s investment principles, this global team focuses on delivering great long-term investment results to help investors reach their financial goals. Our complete wealth management platform, Morningstar Managed Portfolios, offers a broad lineup of strategies built with stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs that advisors can use to help meet their client’s needs at each stage of their life. The platform also offers access to content, events, and thought leadership from Morningstar to help advisors best serve their clients. Everything we do is driven by our independent view, long-term investment approach and desire to always put investors first.  

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.

In this role, you’ll inspire, direct, and teach UX and Visual Designers, Content Strategists, and User Researchers  to ask and answer key questions for customers and help grow our business. Your daily contributions will demonstrate how that’s done – working with product teams to  orchestrate  intelligent and delightful end-to-end  experiences  that are  powered by  clear  and relevant  content. Your deep knowledge of our audiences and business helps our customers feel like they have concierge service to premiere advisor content. You craft these end-to-end journeys while  agonizing over  the details, like  the word choice in a call to action. You’ll rationalize your choices with data, user  research, and your own rich experience. You will routinely check in with stakeholders across the company to keep them in the loop and elevate the contributions of  other  Morningstar designers.

This position is based in our Chicago office.  

Responsibilities 

• As a senior member of the  Investment Management business  unit, you will need to  foster  communication  and  maintain  alignment between cross-functional  stakeholder  teams on  priorities for  resource use and methods  employed.  Stakeholders include  leaders in technology, marketing, sales, client  support,  product  management, and  compliance. 

• For digital product and service experiences, 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 toward those priorities  and fostering awareness across the  Investment Management  business of how designers are advancing  our  objectives. 

• As most of what Investment Management offers is a complex  B2B2C  business model, you will need to develop and maintain  deep understanding of the full  range of types of users  representing  our client base, including  user needs  of  institutional  clients  and their  business  objectives.  

• 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 Investment Management product designs are appropriately consistent with other Morningstar products, ensure participation in continuous improvement of the Morningstar Design System, and that the Investment Management product design team is managed and developed with consistency across the design organization. 

• Design and lead existing and future user experiences for all Investment Management business unit products. This includes helping designers 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.  

• 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 

• 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.