Nationwide Life and Annuity Insurance Co is seeking a Manager, UX Design & Research Operations to lead the operational backbone of our design and research practice. This role is critical to scaling user experience excellence across Nationwide’s digital ecosystem, ensuring that our design system and research operations deliver consistent, accessible, and high-quality experiences for our UX designers and researchers, as well as our Technology partners.
What You'll Do
- Lead and manage the design system delivery team (Designers, Design Engineers), as well as the Research Operations Coordinators and Researchers, providing day-to-day direction, prioritization, and coaching.
- Run the operational cadence for the design system (intake, backlog grooming, sprint planning, status/scorecards), ensuring continuous delivery of new components, enhancements, and defect fixes across our many supported platforms.
- Partner with Practice Leads to translate enterprise priorities into a clear, sequenced roadmap for Design & Research Operations (onboarding, accessibility, research support, participant recruiting, tooling, AI-powered UX, and global UX enablement).
- Coordinate work with the Nationwide India Office (NIO) by standing up shared workflows, onboarding programs, and governance so offshore UX and engineering teams can adopt our design system, research tools, and UX practices consistently.
- Drive DesignOps and ResearchOps maturity and governance by standardizing processes, documentation, metrics, and quality checks that amplify the value of Bolt and UX research.
- Provide people leadership and talent development for Bolt designers, UI engineers, Research Ops coordinators, and at least one researcher, including performance management, growth planning, and hiring.
- Consult and collaborate with stakeholders, product managers, technologists, UX peers and others across the company to provide strategic, creative and technical direction.
- Advocate for empathetic, human-centered design and help mitigate risk by pursuing work based on user insights.
- Design and recommend innovative multi-platform solutions that balance customer needs with business viability and technical feasibility.
- Participate in and facilitate idea-generating sessions evaluating those ideas with regards to technical feasibility, business viability and human desirability.
- Mentor and guide the team in their craft and profession to continually uplift the quality of our work.
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years in UX, Design and/or Research Operations, or related fields
- At least 1 year in a leadership or management role
- Strong understanding of design systems, UX research operations, and agile delivery practices
- Ability to manage cross-functional teams and complex workflows
- Familiarity with design tools (Figma), research platforms (Dscout, User Interviews), component libraries, accessibility standards (WCAG), and collaboration platforms (Jira)
- Experience preparing design systems and operations for AI‑enabled workflows (e.g., machine‑readable components/tokens, design‑to‑code accelerators, AI‑assisted design and research tooling)
- Proven ability to coach and develop talent, foster collaboration, and drive operational excellence
- Exceptional ability to translate strategic priorities into actionable plans and communicate effectively with stakeholders across design, engineering, and product
- Experience working with distributed teams and managing workflows across multiple time zones
- Typically, five or more years professionally practicing some aspect of human-centered design
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills; comfortable presenting to large groups
- Solid, working understanding of UX principles and the human centered design process
- Able to leverage data to make informed design decisions
- Ability to navigate multiple contributor groups and tell compelling stories
- Owns work with little oversight; independently and proactively seeks out answers as needed
- Can provide oversight for a single project or multiple projects
- Acts as a source of expertise for direction, mentoring and guidance for less experienced team members
- Works with development team to resolve technically complex issues requiring alignment across multiple business partners
- Ability to analyze qualitative and quantitative information and external factors that may influence or have an impact on the company, customers, distribution systems, operations, and strategy
- Proven track record of setting work priorities that conform with established objectives, timeframes and accomplish a task in the most effective manner
- Ability to work in partnership with cross-functional teams (e.g., engineers, product managers, designers, business leaders)
- Understand and make progress toward the company’s consumer performance indicator (CPI) and key performance indicator (KPI) goals
- Proven ability to manage projects and define administrative methods and procedures to attain objectives
Nice to Have
- Undergraduate studies in UX, human-computer interaction, psychology, graphic design, information science, communications or related field preferred
Technical Stack
- Figma
- Dscout
- User Interviews
- Jira
Team & Environment
You will manage a team of four or more associates based on organizational structure, including designers, design engineers, research operations coordinators, and researchers. You will report to a Director, Associate Vice President, or Vice President.
Benefits & Compensation
- Medical/dental/vision
- Life insurance
- Short and long term disability coverage
- Paid time off (minimum of 18 days each full calendar year pro-rated quarterly based on hire date)
- Nine paid holidays
- 8 hours of Lifetime paid time off
- 8 hours of Unity Day paid time off
- 401(k) with company match
- Company-paid pension plan
- Business casual attire
Work Mode
This is a hybrid role based in Columbus.
Nationwide is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive culture where everyone feels challenged, appreciated, respected and engaged. Nationwide prohibits discrimination and harassment and affords equal employment opportunities to employees and applicants without regard to any characteristic (or classification) protected by applicable law.
