Director, Experience Design & Research

Location: Letterkenny (Hybrid 2-3 days onsite p/week)

Do you hold yourself to a higher standard? Do you believe everything can be better? Prudential takes great pride in our culture where excellence is core to our DNA! We are building something bold with an internal consulting engine that reimagines how work flows, how people engage, and how value is delivered. When you join our organization at Prudential, you'll unlock an exciting and impactful career - all while growing your skills and advancing your profession at one of the world's leading financial services institutions.

Reporting to the Vice President, the Director of Experience Design & Research will lead a team responsible for designing future state ambition that delivers impactful continuous improvement outcomes, shaping end-to-end journeys across key personas, grounded in deep customer insight, research, and experience design. You will partner with other capabilities across the organization and business stakeholders to fully reimagine value streams for quantifiable impact.

If you have a passion to drive insights to action and influence core operating model discipline at an enterprise level, then this is the role for you.

Who you are:

• A critical thinker; You always ask "why?" and wonder how things can be improved.

• A best- in- class facilitator; You create alignment and clarity in all your workshops, sessions and meetings.

• A strategic storyteller; You know the value of storytelling and how critical it can be in transforming businesses.

• A dependable voice; You always raise your hand and share you point of view.

• An agent of change; You know the only constant is change and know how to navigate ambiguity and prioritize adaptability while working with speed.

What you will Do:

Research & Strategy

• Develop detailed journey maps to visualize and understand the user's experience across different touchpoints. Partner with business stakeholders to optimize future state journey.

• Translate external research, customer insights, market trends, and data into clear design implications and strategic recommendations.

• Shape and evolve future-state customer journey roadmaps in partnership with business, technology, and process leaders.

• Translate insights into actionable experience strategies, initiatives, and roadmaps that can be delivered through cross-functional teams.

• Ensure delivery of execution-ready journey designs that reflect customer needs, process efficiency, and value-stream priorities.

• Ensure research outputs are actionable, timely, and integrated into journey and process redesign efforts.

Facilitation & Collaboration

• Co-design and support the execution of high impact process reimagination workshops and stakeholder engagements

• Run & facilitate workshops and interactive discussion sessions with business and technology partners.

• Collaborate with stakeholders to integrate customer-centric decision-making, inform prioritization, and develop experience-led metrics to align business goals

Strategic Storytelling & Communication

• Translate complicated systems and business problems into digestible, high impact communications and presentations to help stakeholders make decisions efficiently.

Leadership & Mentorship

• Lead and develop the Journey Design and UX Research capabilities, ensuring strong integration between research insights, experience design, strategic storytelling and enterprise process excellence priorities by providing coaching, feedback and growth opportunities

• Guide and mentor researchers, strategists and cross-functional teams working on high priority value streams.

• Champion human-centered design practices for the voice of the customer across enterprise initiatives.

• Foster collaboration, accountability, and core culture and ways of working.

What you will Bring:

• Bachelor's degree required.

• Expertise in customer journey mapping, experience design, and UX research methodologies.

• Experience translating qualitative and quantitative research into actionable insights.

• Experience in customer-centric, digital-first environments.

• Comfortable working cross-functionally, with a track record of building strong partnerships.

• Ability to manage multiple initiatives simultaneously across dynamic business environments.

• Exceptional executive presence and leadership that promotes a high-performance culture.

• Strong communication and synthesis skills to translate process issues into north star opportunity narratives that resonate with stakeholders across all levels, ensuring clarity and accountability.

• Strong problem-solving skills rooted in value adding opportunities, with the ability to identify root cause of issues and true underlying needs.

Nice to Bring:

• Master's degree and consulting experience a plus

• Industry-specific process knowledge relevant to our business sector

What we offer You:

• Health Insurance: PGIM Ireland partner with Laya and BUPA to provide health insurance schemes that cover eligible employees day to day medical and hospital expenses.
• Annual Leave of 23 days at full pay.
• Pension Scheme: Members of the scheme can contribute up to 8% of salary per annum and PGIM Ireland matches contributions up to 8% of salary. Members can also make voluntary contributions to the scheme.
• Annual Bonus Programme & Shop LK Vouchers / CleverCards (subject to eligibility): Along with an annual bonus employees are rewarded with Shop LK Vouchers/ CleverCards which are paid tax free.
• Life Assurance: fully paid by PGIM Ireland, employees are covered from their start date and beneficiaries are provided with a lump sum of four times an employee's salary.
• Education Assistance: PGIM Ireland have an Education Assistance Programme that reimburses eligible employees for furthering their education.

PGIM Ireland is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of applicants' gender, civil status, family status, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, race or membership of the traveler community. PGIM Ireland's aim is to hire the best people for the open roles and all appointments will be made on merit.

Any offer of employment made by PGIM Ireland will be contingent on receiving satisfactory references. Applicants should be aware that background checks will be carried out on all candidates offered a position within PGIM Ireland.