Digital Product Design Leadership
In my current role as Associate Director of Product Design at Vanguard, I’ve had the pleasure of leading an amazing and talented team to bring a user-centered mindset to the work and help deliver on Vanguard’s mission.
Highlights include:
Fostered a creative culture based on collaboration, sharing, and communication.
Collaborated with creative leaders to drive the adoption of Figma and creative workflows to prioritize collaboration and efficiency.
Prioritized the use of Design Systems to drive consistency across experiences and divisions.
Introduced creative meeting standards to facilitate consistent presentations with dedicated feedback loops.
Provided clarity and documentation on Design Career Tracks to allow for growth and mentoring.
Built relationships with key stakeholders across the organization to set the team up for success.
Successfully launched products across a wide spectrum of categories, including: incremental feature updates for the Advice, Cash, and Wealth Management products to a completely refreshed Careers Site for external job postings.
“To take a stand for all investors, to treat them fairly, and to give them the best chance for investment success.”
Timeline
June 2021-present
Team
My Role: Product Design Director
Manage and mentor 30+ creative staff with 10 direct reports
Develop and implement design process strategy across 9 agile teams
Craft team and divisional OKRs to drive strategic priorities
Build relationships across divisions with key stakeholders
Responsibilities across 4 broad categories
Generally, I categorize my time into 4 broad categories:
Team: creative team and staff management including recruitment, onboarding, training, individual goal-settting, coaching, performance reporting, 1:1s, career-pathing, and support.
Product: creative and ux direction on project work, strategic roadmap planning, execution and launch support, and asking lots of questions.
Stakeholders: building and maintaining relationships with individuals across the organization to support communication and collaboration in support of team objectives.
Process: optimizing and refining workflows for project intake, creative reviews, brainstorm sessions, and approvals.
A consistent focus is advocating for human-centered design solutions with our team and partners.
“Brian navigated stakeholder relationships with grace, consistently asking the right questions at the right time to deliver value beyond design, pushing our small design team to accomplish work that organizations of our scale could only dream of. He put into place processes that made the work blossom, driving cross-functional teams and divisions to collaborate openly. The scale of Brian’s impact is immeasurable.”
Design System
Core System
Based on the enterprise-wide system with core Vanguard brand elements, our extension provided a set of reusable patterns and components for the retail division’s responsive site. Built within Figma and linked to the master library, we developed a workflow for divisions to both stay linked to the core elements and contribute to the library.
Usage Guidelines
Beyond the building blocks of the design system, the team developed a set of Usage Guidelines for all of the approved patterns and components. It has become a go-to resource for the team and all of our partners in the organization. As components are built and made available in a common library, the guidelines and authoring documentation is cross-linked for reference.
Process Highlights
Crew Onboarding
A key element of growing the UX design team at Vanguard has been implementing a clear and documented process for new hires. Establishing a clear vision and set of expectations for every member of the team from day 1 has been critical as the team has grown.
Creative Workflow Optimization
As part of several workflow optimization initiatives, I worked with the team to establish a method to categorize projects at intake based on complexity and scope. Project flows, activities and review milestones were drafted based on project tier.
Project Highlights
Personal Investor Homepage
A complete redesign of the Personal Investor Homepage with the following objectives:
Re-introduce the brand. Leverage the latest in brand messaging and allow for rapid updates to stay aligned with campaigns.
Improve SEO. A design and strategy that incorporates the latest best practices to improve ranking and position.
Intentional messaging: A platform of components that allow for personalization and customization to deliver relevant and timely content.
Goal-based navigation: Allow users to explore products and services based on where they are in their financial journey.
Careers Site
A full redesign of the public job listing site (https://www.vanguardjobs.com/) for the Vanguard Talent and HR teams. The design incorporates the latest design patterns and is linked to the broader design system for future updates. The project included managing a vendor for the build and launch of the site and coordination with several key stakeholders across the organization. The work has been well-received and recognized by senior staff.
Funds Experience
We were engaged by senior staff to explore a re-imagined fund shopping experience with new features inspired by trends and best-practices across industries. A few notable concepts:
Product highlights: A video walkthrough to highlight key products, share investing insights, and increase transparency in the product lineup.
Meet the experts: An introduction of the experts behind the products, a sharing of philosophy and principles, and a method to build trust.
Data visualization: A new take on a bubble chart to provide an engaging way for investors to explore the holdings within key funds.