Lead UX_UI Designer

Caterpillar•Chicago, IL

About The Position

As a Lead UX Designer on the Prime Online team, you will provide design leadership for a complex, customer-facing digital platform that supports critical workflows for Caterpillar customers and dealers. This role partners closely with various UX Designers, and Product leadership to set experience strategy, drive cross-team alignment, and ensure high-quality delivery across multiple product pods. You will balance strategic UX leadership with hands-on design direction, helping teams translate business goals and customer needs into cohesive, scalable online experiences. This is a people-multiplier role focused on raising design quality, strengthening collaboration, and accelerating delivery across Prime Online.

Requirements

Creativity: Knowledge of the approaches, tools, and techniques for promoting creative, original thinking and ability to apply it to a variety of business situations.
Web Software Design: Knowledge of web software design; ability to design, develop, maintain and enhance web-based or web-enabled software.
Human-Centered Design (HCD): Knowledge of Human-Centered Design model, principle, and concepts; ability to understand the perspective of people who experience a problem, their needs, and provide them with a solution which truly meets their needs effectively.
User Experience Design: Knowledge of user experience design tools, techniques and approaches; ability to design applications that are valued, positively perceived and used by clients.
User Interface Design: Knowledge of activities, practices, deliverables and considerations; ability to design effective graphic user interfaces for delivery of information to the client's desktop workstation.
UX Leadership & Strategy Level – Extensive Experience: Proven ability to lead UX for large-scale, customer-facing digital products.
Strong judgment in balancing user needs, business goals, and technical realities.
Experience influencing product strategy and aligning stakeholders around a shared experience vision.
Human-Centered Design Level – Extensive Experience: Deep expertise in applying human-centered design methods to complex problem spaces.
Ability to define success metrics, clarify user outcomes, and guide teams from discovery through delivery.
Comfort navigating ambiguity and helping teams focus on the highest-impact problems.
UX & Interaction Design Level – Extensive Experience: Expertise designing intuitive, scalable web experiences and end-to-end customer journeys.
Strong grasp of information architecture, interaction models, and visual design fundamentals.
Ability to produce and guide high-quality design artifacts—from early concepts to production-ready specifications.
Collaboration & Decision Making Level – Extensive Experience: Skilled at facilitating discussions, evaluating trade-offs, and driving decisions in cross-functional environments.
Experience partnering closely with Product and Engineering to deliver outcomes, not just outputs.
Ability to coach others in critical thinking and design rationale.

Responsibilities

Set experience direction for Prime Online by translating product vision and business priorities into clear UX strategies, principles, and outcomes.
Partner at the leadership level with Product, Engineering, and UX Management to influence roadmaps, prioritization, and investment decisions.
Serve as the UX design authority for Prime Online teams —guiding decisions, resolving trade-offs, and ensuring consistency across experiences.
Lead cross-functional discovery and vision work, including journey mapping, concept exploration, and experience framing.
Own design quality and cohesion across features and releases, ensuring alignment with Caterpillar design systems, accessibility standards, and technical constraints.
Run design reviews and critiques that strengthen problem framing, solution quality, and alignment to strategy.
Coach and mentor designers within Prime Online teams, growing autonomy, craft excellence, and strategic impact.
Coordinate across designers and teams to anticipate dependencies, manage experience impacts, and reduce fragmentation.
Partner with Engineering through delivery—reviewing builds, identifying fidelity risks early, and collaborating on solutions.
Synthesize insights from research, analytics, and feedback to inform continuous improvement and future opportunities.
Contribute to UX practice evolution by improving operating models, workflows, and standards that enable scalable, high-quality design.