Innovation Advisor

Overview:

Serves as primary connection point between target users and customers and the New Venture team to find the most effective ways to represent customers pain points, frictions, preferences, and desires to the team. Manages and participates in the use of ethnographic and user research findings to inform and inspire business strategy, product decisions and experience design solutions. Manages and participates in the translation of research insights into powerful stories that shift hearts and minds and directly influence the final design and helps ensure the customer perspective is the guiding principle along the whole process.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Manage and conduct quantitative research investigations that help strategically frame, validate or challenge other forms of research.  Develop ethnographic research and contextual design investigations to understand customer behaviors, pain points, needs, and aspirations.

• Contribute to deep trend analysis and research of interesting exemplars in the marketplace.  Identify insights from customer research and market analysis. Bring research to life through personas, customer journeys and touch points, insight-opportunity frameworks, system maps, stories, and scenarios.

• Manage and participate in the development of design principles and acceptance criteria for product and service. Define service blueprint, front and back office ecosystem and interaction which support business and define behavior design.

• Define brand strategy for customer acquisition and marketing principles for new ventures.

• Manage and participate in the development of design sprints in collaboration with Design team to meet development needs and test plan. Contribute unique ideas within multidisciplinary workshops, meetings and immersion sessions.

• Use divergent and convergent design thinking techniques for the conceptual development of products, services, and/or physical connected form-factors.  Converge innovative ideas to a set of digital and tangible products, services and physical connected form-factors in partnership with other new venture partners.

• Communicate design ideas using techniques, including product concepts, service models, customer journeys, industrial designs, system maps, and/or info graphics.  Iteratively design, test, and refine disruptive products and services.

• Work with Product and Engineering teams to help them understand user experience.

• Support Venture team through internal positioning and mission statement workshops.  Partner with others to ensure new ventures and business builds are set up to deliver strategic value in line with design intent.

• Observe and engage audiences within markets of interest to test commercialization assumptions for audience capture and scaling.

• Contribute to the evolution of strategic design approaches across Bank initiatives. Communicate insights, concepts, and design rationales to internal and external audiences.

• Exercise usual authority of a manager concerning staffing, performance appraisals, promotions, salary recommendations, performance management and terminations.

• Understand and adhere to the Company’s risk and regulatory standards, policies and controls in accordance with the Company’s Risk Appetite.  Design, implement, maintain and enhance internal controls to mitigate risk on an ongoing basis.  Identify risk-related issues needing escalation to management.

• Maintain M&T internal control standards, including timely implementation of internal and external audit points together with any issues raised by external regulators as applicable.

• Complete other related duties as assigned.

Managerial/Supervisory Responsibilities:

• Number of staff - 2-4

Education and Experience Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in design, or another relevant field from an accredited design school (or relevant work experience)

• 6 or more years’ ethnographic research (quantitative and qualitative), divergent exploration, conceptual development, and/or industrial design experience

• 2 or more years’ work leadership, supervisory, and/or managerial experience

• Experience with product prototyping and testing, workshop facilitation, future visioning, and strategy development

• Portfolio of work that demonstrates strong human-centered design capabilities across a diverse range of projects

• Demonstrated history of accountability and performance delivery

Education and Experience Preferred:

• Master’s degree in design from an accredited design school

M&T Bank is committed to fair, competitive, and market-informed pay for our employees. The pay range for this position is $115,703.73 - $192,839.55 Annual (USD). The successful candidate’s particular combination of knowledge, skills, and experience will inform their specific compensation.

LocationBuffalo, New York, United States of America