Design Strategy & Operations, Vice President - HR

Design Strategy & Operations, Vice President

Join our Employee Experience Design team as the Design Strategy & Operations, Vice President, where you'll be the strategic and operational partner to the Head of Design—turning design vision into an operating model that scales across a global workforce. You'll build the "design operating system" (intake, prioritization, funding, governance, metrics, and delivery rhythms) that improves predictability, strengthens craft, and ties design outcomes directly to the firm's highest-value priorities. This is a high-impact leadership role for someone who thrives in complex, regulated environments and can elevate UX through operational rigor, talent strategy, and data-driven execution.

As the Design Strategy & Operations, Vice President in Employee Experience, you are the operational and strategic partner to the Head of Design, accountable for translating design vision into an executable operating model that scales across the Design team delivering employee experiences for a global population. Sitting at the intersection of strategy and operations, this role strengthens how design plans, prioritizes, funds, measures, and delivers outcomes—improving the leverage of design teams and ensuring work aligns to the firm's highest-value business priorities.

This role combines portfolio strategy, operational rigor, and design leadership to build durable systems for execution, talent, governance, and measurement—while protecting the integrity of employee experience and design quality.

Job Responsibilities

• Define and run the design operating system that enables consistent delivery across a multi-team, multi-stakeholder environment. Establish clear mechanisms for intake, prioritization, resourcing, and delivery planning, ensuring design capacity is allocated to the most material employee and business outcomes and that commitments are predictable and transparent.
• Drive portfolio and performance management for the design organization by defining success metrics, reporting cadences, and executive readouts that connect design activity to business outcomes and risk considerations. Build discipline around OKRs (or equivalent), roadmap alignment, and value realization, enabling leadership to make informed trade-offs across competing priorities.
• Operationalize governance across design standards, decision rights, and review forums, creating lightweight but effective structures that accelerate decisions and reduce rework. Ensure cross-functional alignment with product and engineering operating rhythms, clarifying handoffs, dependencies, and escalation paths while preserving design craft and user-centricity.
• Lead the design organization's workforce and financial management, including headcount planning, role architecture, budget management, and vendor strategy. Implement controls and processes for external partners that ensure quality, continuity, and compliance with enterprise procurement, risk, and security expectations.
• Partner with Design Leadership and People/Talent stakeholders to strengthen onboarding, career pathways, performance management, and capability development. Identify systemic skill gaps, build programs to address them, and improve manager enablement so teams can scale without dilution of quality.
• Build and evolve the team's tooling and operational infrastructure, including design system adoption support, research operations partnership, workflow tooling, and documentation practices. Drive automation and simplification where appropriate to reduce administrative burden and improve cycle time.
• Own and scale design-org culture and craft excellence by running a monthly design all-hands and establishing regular communities of practice and learning forums, including showcases and critique, onboarding enablement, and knowledge-sharing rituals that drive alignment, engagement, shared standards, and connection across distributed teams.
• Proactively identify operating frictions and drive adoption of new ways of working across design and adjacent functions. Communicate with clarity and credibility at executive levels, ensuring stakeholders understand priorities, constraints, risks, and expected outcomes.
• Accountable for cultivating a strong design culture by establishing communities of practice and driving design operations rhythms—including monthly all-hands and recurring forums—to align teams, share best practices, and scale design excellence.

Required Qualifications, Capabilities, and Skills

• 7+ years' experience operating at a leadership level in design operations, design program management, product operations, strategy and operations, or a comparable function within a complex enterprise environment.
• Ability to communicate effectively with senior leadership, elevating UX as a critical business driver.
• Experience in Design Program Management, User Experience Design, Design Operations, Product Delivery, or Operations in a cross-functional, agile environment.
• Experience navigating complex matrix organizations, anticipating and resolving blockers, and influencing at all levels.
• Knowledge of end-to-end product design process, design systems, tools (Figma, Claude, Jira, Confluence), and agile delivery methods.
• Growth mindset with enthusiasm for scaling design delivery and enabling data-driven decision-making through innovation and experimentation.

Preferred Qualifications, Capabilities, and Skills

• Knowledge of design and product development processes, workflows, and tools
• Understanding of design principles, accessibility, design systems, research methods, systems thinking, and experimentation practices.
• Professional qualification in Lean Project Management, Agile/Scrum Certification, or Product Management.
• Experience supporting or operating within a large financial services, fintech, or regulated industry environment, with familiarity navigating governance, third-party risk considerations, and security/compliance constraints while maintaining delivery velocity.
• Experience establishing or scaling enterprise design practices, including design system enablement, research operations, content design partnerships, and design quality assurance mechanisms.
• Experience applying AI directly to your strategy and operations practice.