Head of Digital Design - Remote

Our team is primarily responsible for the retail customer journey across both Passenger and Commercial Vehicles. This includes everything from CRM, lead management, web platforms, demand creation, omnichannel sales & eCommerce. We are now setting up a brand new team within the department to lead all digital design. This forms one of the last pieces of the puzzle we needed on this digital transformation journey. This role and team will be extremely important in helping achieve our goal and vision and offers a rare opportunity for an experienced design leader to make one of the world's best known brands an even stronger business. If you are someone who loves a challenge, wants to make a difference, thrives off team work and effect real change - this is the role for you.

We're seeking a design leader who can help set up this new team within Ford. We are looking for someone who is innovative, a real problem solver, able to provide both inspiration and leadership to this new digital design team. This people leader will get the chance to guide their team through a journey of human-centered research to uncover insights that contribute to all phases of the design process while overseeing the creation of seamless product and service experiences across the Ford portfolio of products. This role will be responsible for driving a healthy, inclusive culture, and orchestrating across a broad range of functions and features to produce unrivalled designs while encouraging collaboration, transparency and clarity between multiple offices, teams and functions.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Key responsibilities:

• Lead the UX/UI design team across ford.xx.
• Build out the internal design team - growing our in-house team across UX and UI over the next 12 months. You'll hire, nurture, stretch and challenge that growing team, helping them to work alongside our existing design partners.
• Be an advocate for Design Thinking, supporting Product Owners, Engineering and Designers to work smart and drive a vision for user experience.
• Review, assess and prioritise, working with Delivery Managers and Product Owners to ensure design activity supports the digital delivery roadmap.
• Develop, maintain and scale design processes and tools to drive efficiency and velocity.
• Own the vision for and govern a design system and support day-to-day experimentation and optimisation across the journeys we're responsible for.
• Identify gaps and unmet or latent needs via quantitative and qualitative research. Build cases for design exploration, innovation and usage of new tools.
• Lead and manage interdisciplinary teams through the research/design process to produce high-quality work that materially impacts our partners and customers.
• Champion the voice of the users and leverage inspiration to discover hidden opportunities.
• Craft beautiful and usable designs for digital products by applying your expertise, deep research findings, and collaborating with peers across the product organisation.
• Play an active role in advocating for a Human-Centered Design process and creating a collaborative environment.
• Guide a team to improve both hard and soft skillset, fostering designer growth and career development.
• Establish relationships and work strategically with our agency partners to help them determine where they should be focusing both time and resources.

QUALIFICATIONS

The minimum requirements we seek:

1. Bachelors Degree.
2. 5+ years of experience leading highly-effective user experience teams.
3. 10+ years working on highly collaborative teams, or other multidisciplinary teams.

Our preferred skills:

• Good balance of creativity, leadership and commercial skills, with an ability to prioritise on the go.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills to help convey design decisions clearly to partners.
• Experience in web and/or native app design with expertise in Design Thinking including its application in an Agile setting.
• Experience in qualitative user research and analysing quantitative data, independently or via specialists, to aid insight driven design.
• Proficient understanding of the latest tools and applications, in particular Figma/Invision.
• Experience of running discovery & design workshops with relevant work experience in leading a design team, along with line management experience.
• Validated understanding of UCD, development frameworks, and standard processes as they apply to various platforms and devices.
• Strong verbal, written and visual presentation skills.

Potential Previous Experience:

• Significant experience preferably within Digital, CX, Marketing, Fintech or Agencies.
• UX/UI/Interaction expertise in digital and/or eCommerce environments.
• Passion for customer experience and digital - helping to deliver real life solutions.
• Ability to steer the creative/digital development process and deliver on time.
• Be able to work in a fast paced environment - sometimes under pressure and OK with change.
• Experience in a highly matrixed organisation.
• Experience in managing complex projects, particularly in an international environment.
• Self-motivated, energetic and action oriented.

Requirements of the Role:

• Fluent in English - other European language(s) would be advantageous.
• Willing to travel to the agency based in London and other European markets on ad hoc basis.
• Interviews will take place in January 2023.