Design Director - FDE

About the Organization

Tech at Lilly builds and maintains capabilities using cutting edge technologies like most prominent tech companies. What differentiates Tech at Lilly is that we create new possibilities through tech to advance our purpose – creating medicines that make life better for people around the world, like data driven drug discovery and connected clinical trials. We hire the best technology professionals from a variety of backgrounds, so they can bring an assortment of knowledge, skills, and diverse thinking to deliver innovative solutions in every area of our business.

The Lilly UX team is an enterprise internal digital experience design service team that operates like an agency. We partner with teams around Lilly to create exceptional digital experiences. Our team delivers digital experience design, user experience research, and digital design evaluation with digital accessibility built into everything we make. We also host the Lilly Design System, a world-class design system we use to ensure our product are mobile friendly, accessible, and efficient to create.

Help us figure out how we can make our digital experiences better by generating insightful, powerful research findings!

Lilly is on an exciting journey to transform the technology at Lilly into a world-class technology organization within a Pharma company. Part of this journey is to become a digital product-based organization. As a result, there is a renewed focus on creating both a world class User Centred Design capability to deliver an exciting portfolio of patient and employee facing solutions to power our business. We need your help to understand just how we are going to do that.

What You’ll Be Doing:

You’ll be joining our Incubation Lab, a design and technology team re-imagining our approach to human-centered design innovation and rapid concept development at Lilly. We define, envision and shape differentiated customer experiences that empower individuals to live their best lives, as unencumbered by their condition as possible.

As a Design leader in our Incubation Lab, you'll collaborate with leaders across the organization to define big bets and transformative experiences by leading human-centered design and innovation programs through rapid proof-of-concept and prototyping activities. As a seasoned design leader, you'll maintain a high standard of quality and ingenuity at every step of the process through direct contribution and mentorship of other designers, technologists, and cross-functional peer groups. 

Your fierce advocacy for design and deep empathy for user needs will help elevate our innovation practice and foster a culture that challenges teams to think differently in pursuit of exceptional customer experiences. Through it all, the Design Director will contribute thought leadership, creative thinking and strategic direction to continually evolve and advance our Incubation practice and processes.

How You’ll Succeed:

• Deliver excellence: Set and uphold a high bar for design craft, strategic thinking, and execution across all initiatives.
• Inspire and grow talent: Mentor and empower a team of designers to expand their skills, confidence, and creative impact.
• Drive innovation: Champion experimentation and bold thinking to shape forward-looking experiences that redefine what’s possible at Lilly.

What You Should Bring:

• Oversee a diverse network of internal and external design collaborators to envision transformative experiences that deliver real value to people living with a variety of medical conditions.
• Collaborate with key stakeholders to turn complex and ambiguous problems into actionable design prompts and articulate possible solutions through narrative crafting and interactive proof-of-concepts.
• Cultivate and grow relationships with partner functions to foster a shared sense of the user-centricity and demonstrate how design empowers the creation of better experiences and products.
• Leverage considerable and demonstrable design expertise to offer mentorship, guidance and objective critique to elevate and uphold the design quality bar across products and prototypes.
• Contribute design work directly, when appropriate, to ensure storytelling, prototype and interface artifacts are held to the highest standard of quality.
• Articulate design decisions and rationale effectively and persuasively to a wide range of non-technical and executive-level stakeholders to ensure alignment across programs.
• Understand when and to proceed and when to pivot ideas, based on rapidly evolving circumstances and emerging insights from users or internal subject-matter experts.

 Your Basic Qualifications:

• BA/BS in in Human Computer Interaction, design, or relevant field
• OR high School Diploma/GED with 10+ years of experience in design and/or design research
• 10+ years of experience in design with 5+ years of experience managing and leading other designers and creatives in complex environments.
• Qualified candidates must be legally authorized to be employed in the United States. Lilly does not anticipate providing sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H-1B or TN status) for this employment position.

Additional Skills/Preferences:

• Ability to create and maintain long-lasting and highly collaborative relationships with cross-functional team leaders and external partners across the enterprise.
• Exemplary verbal and written communication skills, possessing the ability to make complex ideas simple and consumable for a broad range of collaborators.
• Deep expertise and practice in the discipline of design with a strong track record of delivering digital experiences in native and web applications while balancing integration and iteration against key measurable priorities, results, and business impact.
• A collaborative and optimistic spirit to navigate difficult challenges without losing the joy, empathy, curiosity and sense of fun that makes design careers so rewarding.
• History leading design teams in healthcare, pharmaceuticals or other highly regulated industries.
• Understanding of contemporary development processes and familiarity with the possibilities and deployment of modern front-end libraries and frameworks.
•  This position is not permanent.  It is for a fixed term position up to a maximum of 4 years.