Senior UX Strategist

If top candidate is located in NYC, expectation would be to be in office as hybrid. Otherwise, this is a fully virtual position.

Global Marketing and Communications at MetLife:

The MetLife Marketing and Communication organization is evolving to enable our New Frontier Strategy. The organization has outlined a new vision – to be a customer-centric and data driven growth engine that takes accountability for contributing meaningful enterprise value and building customer equity.

The organization is on a journey to create a high performing team enabled by a set of modern capabilities. This will require us to change the organization’s expectation of marketing as well as shift the Marketing focus areas. The expected outcomes of this evolution are 1) growth – marketing as an investment with predictable contribution to enterprise value, 2) efficiency/effectiveness through a data driven DNA, 3) capability maturity leading to sophisticated technical and strategic capabilities and 4) talent alignment to enable a modern, agile marketing organization that nurtures, develops, and attracts top talent.

Within GMC, the Customer Experience (CX) team is responsible for CX Strategy, CX Capability Transformation and Experience Design Execution for the MetLife enterprise. The team is responsible for defining principles, standards and assets for stakeholder experiences at MetLife, and for the definition and implementation of CX strategies. Our team members are focused on specific products, segments or platforms, where they collaborate with cross-functional partners to efficiently deliver customer-centric experiences focused on delivery of customer and business value.

The Role:

The Senior UX Strategist sits within CX team. This person will be responsible for guiding cross-functional teams through discovery and vision setting at the journey, solution, and feature levels. They will primarily support our MetLife.Com platform experiences focused on US businesses including but not limited to US Group Benefits, Retirement Income Solutions, MetLife Investment Management, and MetLife Holdings across products, segments and markets.

MetLife is adopting a customer-centric mindset at all levels of the organization as part of its corporate strategy. This role will use experience strategy practices to translate that mindset into tangible outputs. The Senior UX Strategist will leverage user research and design strategy methods to align teams on the right problems to solve. They will participate in shaping tangible visions and experience principles to align teams on what good looks like to our customers. That alignment is critical to ensuring the consistent delivery of quality experiences and ultimately delivering on our business objectives.

The role combines a business focus with creative insight and provides the opportunity to apply experience strategy to key business challenges. The Senior UX Strategist will approach these challenges with an outcomes- and journey-centric lens. Their work will take shape in three ways:

1. Supporting time-bound work to generate foundational strategic insights around user experience and a future state experience vision around platform strategy. This work sits at the journey level and is oriented around specific business outcomes.

2. Embedding CX best practices that align cross-functional teams to support research, concept and feature design, and strategy implementation on an ongoing basis. This work would also entail working closely with and alongside Web Channel Managers, Site Authors, Product Managers and Product Owners in defining and tracking key CX metrics to inform and evaluate the quality of our experiences.

3. Defining platform strategies that align cross-functional teams for impact through product roadmaps, opportunity prioritization, continuous discovery and validation of key insights.

The ideal candidate will be highly skilled in human-centered design, strategy and stakeholder management. As a champion of the customer, they will have curiosity for customer motivations and needs and be fluent in the end-to-end customer journey. They will rally partners around new ways of working and approaching their own business objectives. The person will have experience in a variety of research, analysis and synthesis methods to understand the customer, develop insights that guide solution development, and envision compelling experiences. They should have an entrepreneurial mindset and must be great at building relationships and driving consensus.

Key Responsibilities:

As an expert practitioner, embed with cross-functional teams to define the right opportunities and solutions to improve their customer experiences and execute against their strategic priorities.

• Leads discovery: analyze customer research, competitor data, industry and digital trends and business input to uncover insights and identify opportunities for omni-channel experiences
• Bridges journey vision, insights, audience needs, channel and messaging preferences to deliver timely, relevant information than enables and executes on well-informed decisions
• Builds customer personas and maps send-to-end customer journey, supporting processes, workflows, etc. influencing IA, navigation and experience execution.
• Brings insights, opportunities and concepts to life through diagrams, sketches and other visualizations, including UX artifacts like flows, wires etc. that illustrate vision at any fidelity.
• Recommends leading behavioral metrics to track the impact of experience work on business outcomes, translating data into insights across sales, adoption and engagement journeys.
• Sources user testing opportunities to validate focus areas and early solution direction
• Collaborates with business, product and technology to drive work prioritization, content performance, roadmap development and requirements definition
• Collaborates with design, research, creative, web and digital teams to audit and identify ways to transform and optimize MetLife.Com as a digital engagement landing and triage platform, applying SEO, AEO and AI best practices.
• Challenges traditional business and technology ways of working and organizing information.

Required Experience and Skills:

• Design portfolio submission required
• Deep expertise in human-centered design strategy and innovation
• Ability to create traditional experience strategy artifacts: service blueprints, journey maps, ecosystem maps, personas, concept illustrations
• Fluency in a variety of methods for design research and insights development
• 5+ years of work experience in Design Agencies, Consulting or Experience Strategy and Program Management
• 4+ years of work experience in large, matrixed organizations with deep knowledge of cross-functional stakeholder management
• 4+ years of experience working in digital first organizations (e.g., SaaS) partnering closely with product, technology and design leaders
• 4+ years of experience applying design and systems thinking to solve for digital experiences
• 3+ years of experience working in an agile environment
• Broad understanding of digital marketing and product ecosystem with solid grasp of how experience translates, changes, and connects across platforms, channels and touchpoints
• Ability to quickly learn and demonstrate understanding of businesses where you are embedded
• Excellent communication, presentation and facilitation skills
• Proven ability to build consensus and work effectively within multi-functional teams
• Strong record of success in working on complex, multi-dimensional programs
• Ability to take initiative, think strategically, connect dots across multiple threads and drive results
• Proficiency in design and collaboration tools such as Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, Miro, etc.
• Bachelor's degree required, Masters preferred