Manager, UX Design & Research Operations

Nationwide•Columbus, OH

10h•$108,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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. Do 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.

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.
Undergraduate studies in UX, human-computer interaction, psychology, graphic design, information science, communications or related field preferred.
Typically, five or more years professionally practicing some aspect of human-centered design.
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.

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.
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.

Benefits

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