Manager, UX Design & Research Operations

If you're passionate about helping a Fortune 100 company with nearly $70 billion in annual sales drive their strategy forward through innovative product development and advancing strategic partnerships to protect customers, then Nationwide is the place for you! At Nationwide®, "on your side" goes beyond just words. Our customers are at the center of everything we do and we're looking for associates who are passionate about delivering extraordinary care.

Nationwide 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.

As the leader of the Nationwide design system delivery team, you will drive operational rigor, foster collaboration across Design and Design Engineering, and enable global teams to adopt best-in-class UX practices. This is an opportunity to shape the future of design operations at Nationwide, influencing how we deliver innovative, AI-powered, and inclusive experiences at scale.

Responsibilities

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 the 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, with clear SLAs, rituals, and feedback loops.

Drive DesignOps and ResearchOps maturity and governance by standardizing processes, documentation, metrics, and quality checks that amplify the value of Bolt and UX research, ensuring consistency, accessibility, and compliance at scale.

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 to support an expanding portfolio of 200+ applications and ~100+ designers and researchers consuming our design system and ReOps services.

Requirements

Experience: 5+ years in UX, Design and/or Research Operations, or related fields, with at least 1 year in a leadership or management role.

Skills: Strong understanding of design systems, UX research operations, and agile delivery practices; ability to manage cross-functional teams and complex workflows.

Technical Knowledge: 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).

Leadership: Proven ability to coach and develop talent, foster collaboration, and drive operational excellence.

Communication: Exceptional ability to translate strategic priorities into actionable plans and communicate effectively with stakeholders across design, engineering, and product.

Global Collaboration: Experience working with distributed teams and managing workflows across multiple time zones.

This role does not qualify for employer-sponsored work authorization. Nationwide does not participate in the Stem OPT Extension program.

Due to the nature of this role, candidates need to be hybrid to the Columbus offices.

#LI-DNI

Job Description SummaryDo you have a keen understanding of the value that human-centered design provides in achieving strategic objectives and can you articulate that value to cross-functional teams and business partners? If you’re capable of leading teams through the design process to distill complex problems into clear solutions that exemplify standard methodologies and encourage others, then we want to know more about you!

As a manager in our User Experience (UX) organization, you’ll lead a team to drive the delivery of outstanding customer experiences. You’ll be an accomplished or emerging people leader, proficient in managing others in their work and career development. You’ll be a visionary and share our passion for creating exceptional experiences that have a real impact on people’s lives and futures.

Job Description

Key Responsibilities:

Consults and collaborates with stakeholders, product managers, technologists, UX peers and others across the company to provide strategic, creative and technical direction.

Advocates for empathetic, human-centered design. Helps mitigate risk by pursuing work based on insights and an understanding of our users.

Problem solves, thinks big, influences and explores divergent ideas while understanding how to converge and build iteratively towards the best solution.

Designs and recommends innovative multi-platform solutions that balance customer needs with business viability and technical feasibility.

Participates in and facilitates idea-generating sessions evaluating those ideas with regards to technical feasibility, business viability and human desirability.

Able to think strategically and connect your work to a larger picture. Helps everyone consider the end-to-end experience and connect the dots.

Mentors and guides the team in their craft and profession to continually uplift the quality of our work.

Perceive rapid advancements in technology and how customers expect to interact with our company.

May perform other responsibilities as assigned.

Reporting Relationships: Reports to Director/Associate Vice President/Vice President. Manages a team of four or more associates based on organizational structure.

Typical Skills and Experiences:

Education: Undergraduate studies in UX, human-computer interaction, psychology, graphic design, information science, communications or related field preferred.

Experience: Typically, five or more years professionally practicing some aspect of human-centered design.

Knowledge, Abilities and Skills: Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Comfortable presenting to large groups and explaining design rationale to other parts of the business. 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 and subject areas.

Ability to analyze qualitative and quantitative information and external factors that may influence or have an impact on the company, as well as the 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, etc.). 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.

Other criteria, including leadership skills, competencies and experiences may take precedence.

Staffing exceptions to the above must be approved by the hiring manager’s leader and HR Business Partner.

Values: Regularly and consistently demonstrates Nationwide Values.

Job Conditions:

Overtime Eligibility: Not Eligible (Exempt)

Working Conditions: Normal Office Environment. Extended work hours may be necessary during heavier volume work periods. Travel required as necessary.

ADA: The above statements cover what are generally believed to be principal and essential functions of this job. Specific circumstances may allow or require some people assigned to the job to perform a somewhat different combination of duties.

Benefits

We have an array of benefits to fit your needs, including: medical/dental/vision, life insurance, short and long term disability coverage, paid time off with newly hired associates receiving a minimum of 18 days paid time off 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, and more. To learn more about the benefits we offer, click here.

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.

#marketing

NOTE TO EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES:

We value the partnerships we have built with our preferred vendors. Nationwide does not accept unsolicited resumes from employment agencies. All resumes submitted by employment agencies directly to any Nationwide employee or hiring manager in any form without a signed Nationwide Client Services Agreement on file and search engagement for that position will be deemed unsolicited in nature. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is subsequently hired as a result of the referral or through other means.

Nationwide pays on a geographic-specific salary structure and placement within the actual starting salary range for this position will be determined by a number of factors including the skills, education, training, credentials and experience of the candidate; the scope, complexity and location of the role as well as the cost of labor in the market; and other conditions of employment. If a Sales job, Sales Incentives, based on performance goals are possible in addition to this range. Note on Compensation for Part-Time Roles: Please be aware that the salary ranges listed below reflect full-time compensation. Actual compensation may be prorated based on the number of hours worked relative to a full-time schedule.

The national salary range for Manager, User Experience : $108,000.00-$200,000.00

The expected starting salary range for Manager, User Experience : $108,000.00 - $162,000.00

097138