Senior Associate, Service Design Lead

New York Life•New York, NY

18d•$135,000 - $165,000•Hybrid

About The Position

New York Life is embarking on an ambitious journey to deliver industry-leading digital experiences for our customers and agents/advisors. This is a transformative role where creativity meets purpose. Beyond concepting, this role focuses on designing and operationalizing service experiences that connect strategy, digital products, and operational systems across the enterprise. As a Service Designer on the Design Strategy team, you will play a key role in scaling New York Life’s journey mapping and service blueprinting capability while helping to systematize how service experiences are designed, governed, and evolved across the organization. You will partner with cross-functional stakeholders across product, operations, and technology to map, analyze, and improve the end-to-end experiences that power our business and enrich the lives of our audiences. This role combines systems thinking, facilitation, and strategic design to enable better ways of working across teams, while establishing journey mapping as a core enterprise capability and connecting it to broader design systems and emerging AI-enabled experiences.

Requirements

Experience in service design, experience strategy and journey mapping
Strong systems thinking and ability to connect customer experience with operational and technical ecosystems
Experience contributing to or working alongside design systems or scalable design frameworks
Experience facilitating workshops and working with cross-functional partners
Ability to synthesize research, stakeholder input, and business context into clear journey artifacts
Experience using tools such as FigJam, Figma, or similar collaboration platforms
Comfort working in complex, regulated environments (financial services experience is a plus)

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with AI-enabled, conversational, or assisted service experiences is a plus

Responsibilities

Support a centralized Journey Mapping Center of Excellence (COE) operating in a hub-and-spoke model with business partners
Enable new ways of working by consulting teams on journey mapping standards, frameworks, and best practices
Evolve and manage the tools, templates, and processes needed to create and maintain high-quality journey artifacts
Contribute to defining enterprise service design standards, ensuring consistency and repeatability across teams
Partner with subject matter experts to define and map new journeys across customer, advisor, and internal experiences
Facilitate discovery sessions to identify roles, systems, tools, and processes involved in each journey
Surface friction points, opportunity areas, and moments that matter across the ecosystem
Collaborate with product, operations, and analytics teams to enrich journey maps with pain points, performance metrics, and supporting data
Translate insights into opportunities that inform product roadmaps, operational improvements, and experience strategy
Partner with design system and product teams to ensure journey insights inform reusable patterns, components, and interaction models
Help bridge journey-level strategy and UI-level execution, enabling more consistent and scalable experiences across channels
Identify opportunities to standardize experiences through shared design patterns and service components
Contribute to establishing principles and standards for experiences delivered by human agents, digital interfaces, and AI-driven interactions
Ensure consistency, clarity, and trust across assisted, self-service, and automated touchpoints
Help shape how AI capabilities are integrated into end-to-end journeys while maintaining a human-centered approach
Convert legacy journey documentation into NYL’s interactive digital format
Rationalize content to ensure consistent fidelity, structure, and information hierarchy
Maintain a single source of truth for journey artifacts across business units
Partner with product owners to inventory the digital platforms, systems, and capabilities that power NYL experiences
Capture supporting interfaces, data sources, and planned enhancements that shape journey outcomes