Overview 

Northern Trust is seeking a Principal Product Designer to lead strategic design efforts on our flagship client facing wealth management platform at Northern Trust. A key contributor on our design team that’s transforming the way wealth management clients engage with our advice and financial services. Join us in collaborating with cross-functional product teams, facilitation of human centric design methodologies, ensuring agile delivery of high-quality financial service solutions and seamless experiences for high-net-worth clients and their advisors. Enjoy a culture of design excellence, continuous learning, and career growth opportunities. This is a full time, hybrid role in Chicago, IL. 
 
As a key member of the design team, your primary role and responsibly is leading the design experience and maturity of our product design system, Storybook components, and Figma Library that support the design and agile teams. To improve client trust and perception of the firm's digital sophistication through a cohesive, polished, and premium user experience. And ensure that design assets, components, and experience standards continue to evolve with ever changing environment of digital products and services. 

Working Model: Hybrid

We have a balanced hybrid working model to ensure you get the flexibility you need, and the successful candidate will spend their time between working in the office and working from home.

Objectives and Responsibilities :

• Accelerate product delivery by increasing the availability of reusable, production-ready components, templates, patterns, and page frameworks. 

• Improve consistency across advisor, client, prospect, and operational experiences through standardized interaction and visual patterns. 

• Strengthen alignment between future-state experience vision, product roadmaps, and implementation through continuous Storybook enhancement. 

• Reduce long-term technical and design debt created by delivery-driven compromises that were necessary to support near-term roadmap commitments. 

• Increase operational efficiency by reducing duplicate component development and fragmented experience patterns across domains. 

• Improve scalability of the platform by creating extensible component architectures that support future products, channels, and business capabilities. 

• Increase development efficiency through improved component documentation, implementation guidance, governance, and code reuse. 

• Expand enterprise design system integration to ensure greater consistency across platforms, business domains, and delivery teams. 

• Continuous accessibility maturity by systematically remediating gaps and aligning digital experiences with evolving accessibility standards and best practices. 
   
   

Summary 

A Principal Designer ensures that the design of a new or existing product or offering exceeds the needs of the people who these experiences serve.  The principal design is a subject matter expert, with deep experience, who leads and collaborates to create truly differentiating experiences reflective of Northern Trust’s capabilities and business objectives as well as client and partner needs and behaviors.  

Principal designers work with leadership to craft, refine, implement, and communicate design vision and strategy across teams, business units, and the larger organization. 

Principal designers take ownership for complex design initiatives, delivering solutions that are driven by deep design and business experience. They act as a resource for colleagues with less experience and will run point on specific design activities. They are a master storyteller, systems thinker, and have high levels of influence within business, and technology teams. 

Major Duties 

• Helps to establish an open culture of optimism, experimentation, curiosity, and rapid prototyping 

• Leads multidisciplinary teams to work together with a shared purpose to deliver great design that addresses user’s needs. 

• Achieves success through trial and experimentation, recognizes that prototyping can be done at various levels of fidelity, and has experience doing and leading work 

• Comfortable synthesizing multiple and sometimes conflicting inputs into a common point-of-view 

• Designs and specifies user interfaces and information architecture using human-centered techniques including observational studies, client and partner interviews, and usability testing 

• Has a passion for developing others and will help to identify talent and build teams with a lens to how different personalities and capabilities could fit together on a project to create real impact 

• Looks outside for inspiration around new approaches and tools and has a desire to build bridges to corporate innovation initiatives and the broader design community 

Knowledge/Skills 

• Ability to put Human-Centered Design and UI/UX best practices to work within a professional setting 

• Ability to recognize, predict and incorporate use cases and user interactions into design 

• Expertise in a range of relevant design methods and concepts, which may include low-fidelity sketching, information architecture, wireframe development, usability testing, research planning, competitive analysis 

• Exceptional presentation and storytelling skills, leading teams to a common vision. 

• Highly flexible, adaptable to change and comfortable with ambiguity 

• Exceptional use of collaborative/communication tools, able to present work and decisions effectively within EDR team, through presentation and storytelling skills 

• Clear growth mindset, looking for opportunities to learn and motivated to approach challenges proactively 

• #LI-Hybrid

• #LI-GG1

Experience Required 

• 12+ years demonstrated work experience delivering digital experiences 

• Educated in design or related field, formally or though comparable training 

• Design thinking and UI/UX best practices, as demonstrated in a portfolio of professional work. 

• Experience working with a cross-functional team or large-scale software development lifecycle, preferably in an agile environment 

Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for employment-based visa sponsorship now or in the future. Northern Trust will not sponsor applicants for U.S. work visa status for this opportunity (no sponsorship is available for H-1B, L-1, TN, O-1, E-3, H-1B1, F-1, J-1, OPT, CPT or any other employment-based visa)