Head of Product Design & CX

Job Description

Shape the future of how customers experience ADF

Do you want to build the customer experience, not just one more screen? As our Head of Product Design & CX, you'll lead a connected, mobile-first experience across the whole customer lifecycle: origination, onboarding, account management, payments, servicing, and refinance. Your job is to make all of it feel like one smooth experience, one that earns customer trust and builds lasting value.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll bring sharp product design judgment, a real curiosity about customers, a strategic view of the experience, and the discipline to get things shipped. You'll lead a small, talented team of designers and still do the work yourself on key journeys. You'll build a UX process people can repeat and set the design standards everyone follows. You'll use AI in practical ways across research, idea exploration, prototyping, and testing, and human judgment will always lead. You'll also look past the next release to define a future-state customer experience that drives ADF's growth and revenue goals.

Starting pay is based on skills, experience, and internal equity.

Key Responsibilities:

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• Establish and oversee the UX process: Create a clear, repeatable workflow that runs from problem definition and research through journey mapping, design, prototyping, usability testing, engineering handoff, and post-launch learning. Set practical expectations for design briefs, documentation, review readiness, and acceptance criteria, so every team knows what great work looks like.
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• Create a cohesive end-to-end experience: Set shared design patterns, interaction standards, and reusable components across product areas and customer communications. Connect origination, servicing, payments, and refinance together so customers get consistent information, interactions, and context instead of disconnected screens and handoffs.
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• Define the long-term experience vision: Build and maintain a unified future state for the customer experience that goes beyond the current roadmap. Turn that vision into design priorities that support customer needs, responsible growth, and stronger lifetime economics, while balancing near-term delivery and existing.
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• Lead customer insight and experimentation: Combine voice-of-customer feedback, research, complaints, journey behavior, and a monthly review of competitor experiences to identify meaningful problems. Design and test experience variants, define the events needed to measure them, and partner with Analytics and Engineering on instrumentation. Work with test owners to connect each experiment to a hypothesis, success criteria, and customer safeguards, then turn the findings into better designs.
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• Apply AI to research and design: Use approved AI tools to synthesize customer feedback, spot likely friction, explore design alternatives, build prototypes, and draft UX content and test variants. Check insights against real customer evidence, and review generated work for accuracy, accessibility, and bias. Protect customer data and keep human review and required approvals in place. AI supports customer research and design judgment. It doesn't replace them.
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• Set design and experience release standards: Define experience-quality standards for mobile usability, clarity, fairness, accessibility, privacy, security, and appropriate human escalation. Own the pass/fail decision on design and UX release criteria, and work with the responsible control and technical teams on their requirements.
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• Break down silos and operationalize collaboration: Lead cross-functional design reviews and set how teams share work in progress, raise dependencies, and resolve experience tradeoffs. Reduce duplicated work and conflicting patterns, keep a shared library of proven approaches, and bring CX findings to weekly reviews and the monthly Product Operating Review.
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• Lead and grow designers: Manage a small team of designers while contributing directly to journey design, prototypes, and problem-solving, and help your designers sharpen their craft. Keep priorities clear, give useful feedback, and coordinate with other teams so designs, journey documents, and approval proofs stay consistent.
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• Partner across the business: You'll own the UX process, shared experience patterns, design quality, and cohesion across journeys, working partnering with:
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• Product and journey owners: Define customer problems, prioritize journey improvements, and turn the experience vision into product roadmaps. Align on success criteria and resolve design tradeoffs across journeys, so each release adds to a connected customer experience.
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• Engineering: Collaborates early on technical feasibility, reusable components, and clear design handoffs. Review implementations against agreed UX acceptance criteria, solve experience issues together, and coordinate design and technical readiness before release.
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• Risk, Compliance, Legal, and Security: Bring these partners in throughout research and design to incorporate appropriate safeguards, disclosures, and customer protections. Align early on experience requirements, and make sure releases get the required specialist approvals alongside design sign-off.
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• Analytics: Understand customer behavior, identify friction, and set baseline performance for key journeys. Agree on measurement requirements, and use journey data and test results to judge whether design changes improve customer outcomes.
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• Finance and Lifetime Value leadership: Link measured CX improvements to their economic impact using ADF's shared CLTV framework. Estimate how changes in conversion, retention, and servicing cost add to lifetime value, and confirm those estimates as results mature.
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• Test owners: Turn agreed hypotheses into testable customer experiences and design the variants to compare. Align on success criteria and customer safeguards, then use the findings to refine designs and recommend what to improve or scale.
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• Operations and Servicing: Bring frontline feedback and recurring customer issues into research and design priorities. Improve self-service, make handoffs to assisted support clear, and make sure new experiences work for customers and for the teams supporting them.
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• Marketing: Keep messaging, content, and visual design clear and consistent across acquisition and lifecycle communications. Make sure the experience a campaign promises carries through to the application, onboarding, and the rest of the customer journey.
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Required Qualifications:

Education & Experience

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• Education: Bachelor's degree in Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Product Design, UX Design, Graphic or Visual Design, Cognitive Science or Psychology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
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• Experience: 10+ years of overall experience in product, UX, or CX work.
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• People leadership: 3+ years managing a team, including small teams.
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• Domain experience: 3+ years in consumer fintech, lending, payments, or another regulated, high-trust digital service.
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• Product design ownership: A track record of taking consumer-facing digital products from research through launch, with a strong portfolio of mobile-first journeys and measurable outcomes.
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• Coaching and collaboration: Experience mentoring designers, reviewing work, and setting practical priorities while staying hands-on.
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• Systems thinking: Experience building a UX workflow, shared design patterns, or a design system that multiple product teams have adopted successfully.
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• Portfolio: A portfolio that shows your specific individual contribution, the customer problem, the evidence behind your design decisions, how you collaborated with delivery partners, and what changed after launch. Include examples of AI-assisted work that make individual judgment and contribution clear. We want to see how you solved problems and improved experiences, not just how polished the final screens look.
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Skills & Competencies

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• Hands-on design judgment: Strong skills in interaction design, information architecture, prototyping, and design critique, plus fluency in current design and collaboration tools.
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• Applied AI fluency: Practical experience using AI for research synthesis, concept exploration, prototyping, or content development. You can show where it improved the work, how you evaluated the outputs, and when not to rely on it.
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• Research and experimentation: You have the ability to plan practical customer research and usability testing, synthesize qualitative and quantitative evidence, and run controlled experiments without overstating what the results prove.
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• Cross-functional influence: You can communicate a clear experience vision, make tradeoffs explicit, and work constructively with Product, Engineering, Analytics, Marketing, Operations, and control functions.
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• Business and customer judgment: You can link experience decisions to conversion, successful task completion, retention, cost to serve, and customer lifetime value, while keeping customers well informed and the right safeguards in place.
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Preferred Qualifications:

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• Advanced degree: Master's degree in HCI or Interaction Design.
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Equal Employment Opportunity

The Company is an equal opportunity employer. The Company makes employment decisions based on merit, and does not unlawfully discriminate based on age, race, creed, color, religion (including religious dress and grooming practices), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and/or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender (including gender identity and expression), marital status, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, military or veteran status, physical or mental disability, legally protected medical condition, genetic information, family care status, military caregiver status, reproductive health making decisions, or any other category protected by federal or state law. The Company prohibits discrimination, bullying, or harassment of any individual on any category protected by state or federal law.