Senior Design Director at Absa

Job Summary

Senior Design Director is responsible for driving Absa’s customer and design strategy across a design function or a highly complex strategic area in the organization. She/he acts as a thought partner to senior business leaders in formulating a customer experience strategy and ensures customer thinking is embedded in all decision making. Senior Design Director oversees the 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 Senior 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 driving development and implementation of business strategy through design decisions and providing insights and direction to the business at senior levels. Senior Design Director is an experienced people leader, who is able to oversee multiple large projects simultaneously. She/he is passionate about high-quality customer design and developing the skills and capabilities of the people in her/his organization. Experience and understanding of process design are beneficial.

Job Description
Accountability: Design Capability development

• Build a Design Centre of Excellence; grow and develop functional design capability by creating new design standards and tools to ensure continuously improving and consistent design quality across the business
• Create an environment of innovation, quality, and ownership within the Design Office
• Support the Head of Design in creating and articulating a wider Design Office strategy to deliver a truly exceptional customer experience across Absa
• 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: Thought leadership and innovation

• Formulate the channel/BU customer experience strategy to enable the delivery of the business strategy, conceptualize the impact of the strategy to design choices and focus, and specify the appropriate measures for monitor outcomes
• Drive innovation across Absa’s product and solution design, challenging the existing thinking and limitations to deliver step-change in customer experience
• Act as a thought leader to business and channel leadership, providing insights and advice based on deep expertise in design thinking, design solutions, and global best practice
• Deliver the highest quality, creative, and innovative design solutions to highly complex problems, Deliver projects which enable the business to deliver on its customer experience, brand promise, and GoTo strategic agenda.

Accountability: Project management

• Manage a large portfolio of projects, creating innovation and ease of use that delights Absa customers and is also recognized externally as the market-leading design
• Identify synergies across different projects and project portfolios, uplifting the design quality or reducing the effort and time to market for the different solutions
• Drive a great and consistent customer experience across a highly complex area within the bank, with a large number of stakeholders and competing priorities, ensuring focus on highest impact areas and delivery of exceptional outcomes
• Combine the understanding of the business strategic intent and customer insights into tangible project proposals and briefs, with large value-add to the business; support Design Directors and Senior Designers in translating these into project scopes and project plans
• Oversee several simultaneous projects, providing guidance and direction across all, and understand where to dive deeper to ensure great delivery. Engage and inspire entire design project teams.
• Allocate and monitor design resources to ensure that quality work will be completed on time and to budget; involving external design agencies to manage demand when appropriate.

Accountability: People Leadership

• Create a design ecosystem and physical environment in which designers will thrive, be motivated by, and develop as professionals
• Drive the talent pipeline to ensure the right balance of senior and junior talent across different functional skillsets
• Promote the professional development of the individual designers through one to one mentoring, training, and providing the right opportunities for development
• Take ownership of building a best practice knowledge base and processes; and creating programs that grow design knowhow in wider RBB.
• Positively contribute to the Design Community in South Africa

Education

• Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: General (Required)