Design Director at Absa

Design Director is responsible for driving Absa’s customer and design thinking across a business unit or a channel. She/he supports senior business leaders in embedding the customer thinking in the strategy and decision-making, and provides insights and input to the process. Design Director manages multiple design projects in her/his business area and ensures they deliver coherent, world-class customer experience aligned to the business strategy and needs.

An ideal Design Director is an expert in her/his field of design and able to provide consistently excellent and creative design solutions. She/he has a track record of delivering design projects with large and tangible customer and business value. Senior Design Director is a passionate about managing and developing people in her/his team, and providing guidance and motivation both in- and outside her project teams.
Job Description
Key Accountabilities
Accountability: Business alignment and strategy

• Partner with business and product leadership to give advice on customer experience and to align with business strategy and needs. Identify opportunities, and provides guidance on the vision and objective of the project.
• Continually elevate the quality of experiences, products and services we design to enable the business to deliver on its customer experience, brand promise and GoTo strategic agenda
• Work with customer metrics and measurements to both monitor and manage the quality of design delivery and to create tangible customer insights needed for the decision making
• Stay abreast of industry trends and role players and ensure that RBB is well positioned to provide competitive and industry leading Design

Accountability: Project management

• Define objectives, scope and deliverables of each project and align with the business to ensure clear project plans and delivery model
• Allocate and monitor design resources to ensure that quality work will be completed on time and budget. Involve external design agencies when appropriate
• Closely direct designers who are driving day-to-day design detail. Engage and inspire entire design project teams.
• Take ownership of the customer experience within the project and constructively challenge business and technical decisions to ensure the best possible experience for the customer.
• Sign‐ off designs at various milestones, ensuring high quality, consistency and adherence to design standards
• Ensure the projects remain on course and reach the highest standards of design that create an innovation and user value.
• Develop and nurture relationships across teams and disciplines to promote collaboration and efficiency
• Actively seek ways to measure impact of the design to the customer and business, reporting the insights to the senior management and business stakeholders
• Provide updates and present final designs to senior Absa leadership

Accountability: World class design

• Deliver projects, which lead to the creation of an industry leading customer experience, which is notably different, far exceeds expectations and is at the global forefront of simplicity and usability while still maintaining the depth and richness in functionality of the Absa product set.
• Leverage insight and data to ensure that products/services/solutions are truly designed around the customer/client/colleague.
• Ensure the teams embrace design thinking and best practice standards in developing design options and narrowing down the final solution
• Determine and set the optimal design approach for projects from ideation to final design implementation, providing and documenting personas and journey maps, site-mapping, wire-framing, prototyping, user-testing, visual assets, front-end code etc.

Accountability: People Leadership

• Actively manage the people in the teams, supporting them in prioritization, problem solving and technical development
• Create a design office and team environment in which designers will thrive, be motivated by and develop as professionals
• Promote professional development of the individual designers through one to one mentoring, training and providing the right opportunities for development
• Actively contribute the overall knowledge management, providing insights and direction; and by bringing people together to share knowledge

Role / Person Specification:
Education And Experience Required

• B Degree in a Design discipline such as product, industrial, service, interaction, or digital design or equivalent NQF level 7 qualification
• Must have at least 5 years’ experience directing complex, commercial, design projects at a leading agency or within internal design function at a major brand involving senior stakeholders and interdisciplinary creative teams.
• Must have a design practitioner background and foundation within one or more disciplines. Ideally with a portfolio of award‐winning work in the financial services industry.
• Strong track record of delivering high quality design projects with strong customer impact and proven value-add to the business
• Experience conducting audience and usability research, utilising this data and other data sources to drive design decision making and measure impact is essential
• Familiar with designing product, services and experiences across multiple touch points.
• Has worked with large budgets and major brands.
• Other commercial or operational business experience advantageous.

Knowledge and skills:

• You may be specialized in a particular field e.g. digital, service or product design.
• Highly creative with the ability to generate ideas and practically contribute to design details.
• Ability to communicate ideas through drawing, digital tools, prototyping, model making etc.
• Ability to inspire others.
• Ability to influence stakeholders at all levels, including outside the design team. Senior level written and verbal communication including public speaking.
• Ability to create project briefs and not just deliver them.

Competencies:

• Strategic Capability
• Customer Focus
• Business Acumen
• Results Orientation
• Innovation Leadership
• Problem Solving Leadership
• Inspirational People Leadership
• Collaboration and Influencing

General

• The appointment will be made in line with the Divisional Employment Equity strategy.

Education

• Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Physical, Mathematical, Computer and Life Sciences (Required)