Lead Experience Strategist (Hybrid)

M&T Bank is seeking a dynamic and highly skilled Lead Experience Strategist to join our integrated Experience & Process Design organization. This team is accountable for shaping and scaling enterprise-wide experience, service, and process design capabilities to deliver cohesive, customer-centered, and operationally sound outcomes across the bank. This is a multidisciplinary team that spans service design, journey design, design strategy, and process engineering, and will operate at the intersection of business, technology, and operations. The team will be responsible for maintaining the standards that allow these practices to scale sustainably across the enterprise and will also be deployed to engagements throughout the enterprise, acting as a thought partner and consultant to business leaders as their teams build and deliver exceptional end-to-end customer experiences.

The ideal candidate is a seasoned design lead who can operate equally well as a trusted advisor and coach to business partners and teams and design executor to support scale of human centered design practices and delivery of measurable business impact in a regulated environment. 

Key Responsibilities:

Enterprise Experience & Process Strategy Execution

• Independently develops and initiates the process/approach to be used by a cross-functional team to understand and define complex problems and develops and implements the solutions to be used to tackle the problem.  
• Complete, and at times oversee, complex research, analysis, design, development efforts throughout the process of problem framing, solutioning and concept development.  Engage cross functional colleagues (eg. agility, change management, transformation delivery, business partners, CX partners, user experience research, operations, technology, compliance) to ensure business objective alignment, throughout. 
• Conduct high level scoping and framing activities (ie. high level discovery) of potential future work, assess for and recommend course of action.  Develop approach for scoping and planning activities for validated engagement/projects.  May oversee team execution. 
• Influence strategic business objectives through highly analytical, human-centered consultation to business partners grounded in thorough understanding and definition of problem space.  
• Evaluate and understand complex interrelationships and effects among enterprise programs, technology, business operations/processes, customers and employees.  Anticipate impacts of a problem, approach or solution. Leverage a strong understanding of the business environment and needs within the area of responsibility.
• Monitor the conditions for team to successfully employ experience methods throughout process of problem identification, solutioning and concept development.  Address any issues, escalating when appropriate.

Consultative Partnership & Influence

• Engage deeply with executives and senior leaders to understand their goals and challenges, co-create solutions, and embed experience and process thinking into their strategies enabling outcome delivery and scaling of practices. 
• Influence decision-making at all levels of the organization through compelling storytelling, data, and clear articulation of trade-offs. Develop, complete and present engagement reports; present project, status or activity-related information to senior management to ensure their awareness of engagement impact and any pertinent roadblocks.  
• Translate insights into pragmatic, actionable recommendations.

Managerial/Supervisory Responsibilities:

• May coach more junior design team members or peers with developing discipline expertise.

• Bachelor's degree in Service Design, Human Computer Interaction, Strategic Design, or similar, and a minimum of 5 years relevant experience or in lieu of a degree, a combined minimum of 9 years education and/or relevant work/service design experience
• Proven expertise in Design Thinking/Human-Centered Design
• Developing expertise in principles and practices of Change Management and Agility
• Experience creating service blueprints, illustrated journey maps, concept designs, service experience prototypes, empathy maps, and value proposition proposals to communicate ideas and designs to different groups of stakeholders
• Hands-on experience designing for a variety of digital touchpoints and non-digital channels and supporting the delivery of those designs
• Experience with conceptualization, ideation, and iterative prototyping, and with employing various methods to prototype service concepts such as staging and role-playing approaches
• Project and people management skills; experience functioning as a project leader as well as an individual contributor
• Strong ability to mentor and educate others on the value and principles of good experience design
• Team player who is comfortable navigating ambiguity within a self-directed culture
• Ability to establish strong working relationships with colleagues, clients, and key stakeholders
• Extensive experience conducting remote and in-person workshops; strong familiarity with supporting tools such as Miro and Webex
• Proficiency in industry best practices for digital and non-digital products and services

Education and Experience Preferred:

• Consulting experience
• Relevant advanced degree or certification
• Financial services experience
• Knowledge of change theory and change management practices
• Knowledge of agile practices and methodologies

Work Model & Office Locations:

This role follows a hybrid work model, requiring onsite presence four days per week at one of M&T Bank’s regional offices. Candidates must reside within a reasonable commuting distance to one of the following locations:

• 345 Main Street, Buffalo, NY
• 115 Federal Street, Boston, MA
• 1 Light Street, Baltimore, MD
• 1350 I Street NW, Washington, DC
• 1100 North Market Street, Wilmington, DE
• 277 Park Avenue, New York, NY
• 850 Main Street, Bridgeport, CT
• 77 Pine Street, Burlington, VT

Anticipated Travel Requirements:

• Employees in this position should be prepared to travel at least once per month.
• Travel frequency may fluctuate based on business demands and the nature of assigned projects.
• Employees located outside the Buffalo market are generally expected to travel more frequently than those already based there