Solution Designer (XD) at Sage

Job Description

 At Sage, Business Analysts play a mission critical role, using empathic methods to design and deliver products and services that delight our users.
With specialty in one or more of: product design, interaction design, visual design, or user research; they engage across the XD community, product management, product marketing, and engineering.

Business Analysts combine user knowledge with analysis and artistry. They:

• Are inspired by first-hand user engagement, and immersed in user context and the problem domain.
• Transform complex business scenarios into useful solutions that are easy to learn, and efficient to use, meeting the exact needs of the user with simplicity and elegance.
• Delight users with extraordinary emotional experiences, delivering innovative, great-looking, and uniquely ‘Sage’ experiences that users love.
• Design for the whole - end-to-end user journeys, across Sage Business Cloud, and for Sage’s design language system.

An Experience Designer is an established performer with strong communication skills who proactively builds relationships. They:

• Have a track record of contributing to shipped projects.
• Self-sufficiently solve major product areas, with thorough rationale and critique.

Key Responsibilities

• As a Business Analyst you need to collaborate with customers and local, legal experts, as well as actual system users to ensure requirements are correctly interpreted and communicated to the Product Delivery Teams.
• Assist the Product Owner/Product Manager (where applicable) to drive the backlog based on a logical progression of delivery.
• Add logical input into Roadmap to ensure the right elements are in place to be able to deliver key epics.
• Transform uncertainty, and sometimes conflicting information, into process flow combining input from across the product team.
• Through technical expertise and legislative insight, provide the interconnect between PM, XD and Engineering.
• Alignment of multiple cross-functional teams.
• Deliver an extraordinary customer experience through best in class products and services.
• Executing problem definition, requirements engineering, risk escalation, solution design, coordination of communication as well as discovering business rules and constraints.
• Planning, estimate tracking and progress reporting for own work and (As required) that of relevant team members.
• Collaboration with other solution designers and stakeholders as well as defining and managing effective stakeholder relationships.
• Furthering knowledge of analysis, technology, Sage organisation/processes and appropriate domains
• Helping to mentor, challenge and develop junior team members.
• Ensuring that the deliverables are of the desired content, suitability and quality.
• Responsible for their own personal development and seeking out opportunities to develop further within the role.
• Problem solving and investigation.

Skills, Know-how And Experience

• Business Analysts are strong with many of the following skills, given their sub-domains.

General

• 2-5 years professional experience.
• A Relevant Degree or National Diploma, preferably in a business or IT related field
• Knows and applies the fundamental concepts, practices and procedures of Solution Design.
• Ability to document requirements and specifications in their field.
• Strong accounting background.

Skills

• Iterative, customer-centric exploration of problems and solutions.
• Understand business goals and strategy, perform competitor analysis, understand business rules, legislation, and constraints.
• Apply design thinking to determine the best solution.
• Requirements definition and elicitation techniques, resolving conflicting requirements, validating requirements across multiple stakeholders while considering impact on the customer and product.
• Accurate, unambiguous design deliverables aligned to business goals and strategy, estimation, phasing delivery, innovative and inventive in devising quality solutions.
• Communicates complex ideas, requirements and solutions clearly, articulately and effectively, using the most appropriate tools and methods. Communication and presentation of design rationale.
• Validate the solution and either persevere or pivot approach.
• Support others in interpreting and implementing solutions.
• Knowledgeable in a specific domain, component or product (Preferred)
• Knowledge of Agile methodology (Scrum/Kanban preferred)
• Experienced in designing and implementing Business Analysis artefacts
• Experienced in delivering products that meet users’ needs in a relevant domain
• Experienced in analysing and modelling business processes (BPMN preferred)
• Experienced of working with software development teams
• Experienced in key technologies and patterns
• Experienced in customer facing roles
• Experienced in offering challenges and new ideas

Interaction Design Skills

Strong With Many Of The Following

• Adapts interaction design standards, processes, industry best practice, and trends to context.
• Competitor analysis, discovery of business rules and constraints, definition of the user model.
• Selection of high-level layout patterns, UI elements, and navigation patterns. Design of information architecture and hierarchy.
• Divergent and convergent, iterative design-led problem solving, with rationale.
• Visualize and communicate user behavior and needs through mental models, personas, scenarios, storyboards.
• Create compelling screen flows, rapid prototypes, layout patterns, information architecture, wireframes.
• Production of final UI and interaction specifications, working with engineering.
• Applies design techniques for improving usability and accessibility, and methods to evaluate them.

Visual Design Skills

Strong With Many Of The Following

• Adapts visual design trends, processes, and industry best practice to context.
• Visual design concepting and exploration, sketching, mood boards.
• Visual design of componentry and style sheets.
• Aligns with brand, pattern libraries, and design language systems.
• Production of high-fidelity pixel-perfect visual designs, and key states treatments.
• Skills in motion, transition, and animation.
• Production of visual specifications and assets for engineering.