Senior Design Director: Digital

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together one story at a time.
- With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

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.

Job Description

Education and experience required- Bachelors Degree (Honors or Masters level will be preferred) in a Design discipline such as product, industrial, service, interaction, or digital design (NQF Level 8-10) &/or equal work experience- 12+ 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.- A design practitioner background and foundation within one or more disciplines. Ideally with a portfolio of award‐winning work in the financial services &/or banking industries.- Strong track record of delivering complex, high quality design projects with varying design approaches, with strong customer impact and proven value-add to the business- Other commercial or operational business experience advantageous.- Leading, managing and providing coaching on within large complex matrix teams and projects- Senior and Executive stakeholder management- Thought leadership in the design domain- Portfolio of evidence of successful strategic design delivery, projects and outcomes- Financial services &/or banking industry experience/exposure will be a distinct advantage

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 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

Thought leadership and innovation- Formulate the channel/BU customer experience strategy to enable 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 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.

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 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