Job Description
Wood Mackenzie are the global research, analytics, and consultancy business powering the natural resources industry. For 50 years, we have been providing the quality data, analytics, and insights our customers rely on to inspire their decision making.
Our dedicated oil, gas & LNG, power & renewables, chemicals, metals & mining sector teams are located around the world and deliver a variety of projects based on our assessment and valuation of thousands of individual assets, companies, and economic indicators such as market supply, demand, and price trends.
We have over 1,900 employees in 30 locations, serving customers in nearly 80 countries. Together, we inspire and innovate the markets we serve – providing invaluable intelligence to help our customers overcome the toughest challenges, and make strategic decisions that will, ultimately, accelerate the world’s transition to a more sustainable future.
We’re looking for a Principal UX designer!
We’re looking for a Principal UX Designer to join our team and continue to rethink how our customers interact with and consume data within the energy industry. You’ll have the support of the team but the autonomy to conceptualise new ideas as well as contributing back to our bespoke design system and validating your work with our customers themselves. We’re looking for someone who’s upbeat, curious and is hungry for data, insight, and trying new things to get to great solutions.
Our design team works across our offices in Edinburgh and London, with colleagues around the globe. Wood Mackenzie's ongoing digital transformation aims to redefine how customers interact with our comprehensive, industry-leading data, so if you fancy a challenge, we have lots of very interesting design tasks to get your teeth into. We work with the latest technologies, so you can expect to collaborate with designers in Figma and see developers working in React. We’re not afraid to challenge our own assumptions, iterating on different ways of working just as we would products for our customers.
The Design team operates as part of the Product organisation, forming critical partnerships with every function. We want to make sure that Wood Mackenzie’s digital products are led by customer insight and inspiration. We work across a range of digital products, embedded in cross-functional agile teams, while collaborating as a core design team to give and receive feedback, share best practices and pool our knowledge (and have fun!).
Qualifications
You will
- Deliver and manage a number of high quality, well thought out projects grounded firmly in an understanding of the customer and the business
- Line manage 3-5 people, offering formal management as well as mentorship and design guidance
- Deeply understand of customers and business drivers, to deliver best in class, innovative and elegant user experiences
- Actively guide product decisions by establishing effective partnerships with stakeholders across the business
- Ensure high quality delivery across the UX team
- Collaborate with colleagues and stakeholders to keep our thinking joined up across the whole estate
- Create and embeds processes and templates to improve our ways of working
- Actively working to find new opportunities for improved strategy or ways of working
You will
- Be skilled in Figma
- Have experience of designing or working in a design system, using your skill to innovate and improve it.
- Be used to designing, carrying out and synthesising your own research, as well as working with others to conduct research.
Principal UX Designer/Researcher
- Enables high quality and innovative UX work by influencing and directing designers and other stakeholders across the business, as well as by being a skilled individual practitioner.
- Provides design leadership and facilitates effective team interaction. Supports less experienced designers, reviews design quality, refines and models good design processes and practices.
- Demonstrates detailed understanding of their business area and actively shares it to multiply impact for team and wider stakeholders.
- Represents Design in Cross functional leadership teams across the business, as well as working across CFLTs to understand alignment and opportunities.
- Responsible for the overall quality of design and research delivered across the team, providing mentoring and formal reviews where appropriate.
- Owns and co-ordinates key areas of strategic delivery for UX.
Communication (Be active, show your workings)
- Cross-disciplinary relationships and ability to distil a range of views and problems into a common set of things to solve
- Clear and open communication with stakeholders & colleagues to keep work moving forward. and resolve issues before they become a problem
- Comfortable planning and facilitating collaborative group activities
- Able to present ideas in a compelling fashion
- Actively seeks feedback on their own work, and actively seeks to offer it on others
- Actively communicates the outcomes of success measurements e.g. user testing or analytics to the relevant stakeholders
Problem Solving (Clarify the brief, be systematic)
- Looks beyond individual areas or projects to see how problems can be solves across a wider range
- Pushes and redefines existing processes to improve things
- Coordinates and oversees UX activity across multiple projects or initiatives
- Can tackle conflict or areas of improvement confidently and positively, using it as a catalyst to make improvements to ways of working
Empathy (Nurture relationships, seek understanding of customers)
- Develops network of strong working relationships both within and beyond the UX team.
- Able to confront and navigate challenging situations, and create lasting improvements
- Sees and addresses areas of stress and conflict in colleagues, driving out improvements in ways of working and culture
- Champion of needs of the user or customer in any initiative, increasingly steering others in the business to be customer champions too
Design (Be led by customer understanding, explore possibilities)
- Confidently explores and leads a broad range of different ideas
- Able to clearly articulate the intention and function of everything they produce to stakeholders and build partners
- Contributes to design system as well as using it skilfully. Knows when to follow patterns and when to challenge them
- Seeks to rigorously measure the impact of design work, using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative mechanisms
Strategy (ask why, consider the wider context)
- Influencing strategy and direction of thebusiness based on understanding of customer needs and best practice in industry
- Able to conduct and analyse research on target audiences, competitors or industries to suggest new directions or reveal potential challenges
- Can work with brand and marketing partners to align and influence UX work and the wider brand strategy
Leadership (Support others, share knowledge)
- Actively creating ways of working to improve quality and team growth
- Formally reviews work in the team and offers structured, incisive and actionable feedback
- Supports team members in their growth, offering informal and formal ad hoc advice sessions and catch ups
- Directly manages designers, responsible for talent review and overall line management tasks
- Can formally coach or train people outside the design team to learn new skills, techniques and ways of working