Are you ready to elevate digital experiences and lead a service design and research squad in shaping exceptional user experiences? Reporting to the VP CX Transformation and Service Design, this role combines strong CX/design leadership with hands-on enablement, ensuring quality research and service design work moves beyond artifacts and workshops and into roadmaps and delivery priorities.
At Manulife, we are committed to becoming a digital-first organization and to lead in our industry in those digital customer experiences. Alongside the Director Experience Strategy and Research, the Director Research and Insights you will co-create the vision and strategy for the service design craft maturity and partner to drive positive and customer focused change in our Canada businesses. And, as design and research evolve at pace with emerging technologies, you will support and champion the team’s evolution and adoption of AI.
You will co-lead the Service Design craft across Canada businesses, co-creating with your Director level colleagues a Journey Management practice and a service design to solutions and research methodology that converts insights into tangible customer and business outcomes. You’ll guide a squad of service designers and researchers; partner closely with Product Design to concept and validate meaningful solutions; and collaborate with peer directors in Design Strategy and Quant/Qual Research to link vision, evidence, and execution—bringing insights to action swiftly.
This is a highly collaborative role which requires excellence in both what and how you deliver work. The successful candidate will be confident in their strong craft and a fair and flexible parter in a complex business environment. The role demands not only resilience when tackling hard challenges with others, but also enthusiasm and joy in getting things done together.
Position Responsibilities:
Build The Practice
Establish and scale a Journey Management practice that continuously researches, measures, optimizes, and orchestrates end-to‑end customer journeys across channels and front/back operations.
Define and operationalize a service design-to-solutions methodology—from discovery and framing to blueprinting, concepting, piloting, and scaled adoption—grounded in measurable outcomes.
Co-create a playbook for working effectively with Product Design and the Canada businesses.
Champion, support and drive adoption of AI to streamline processes and elevate what the team can accomplish.
Lead Craft Leadership & Standards
Lead the Service Design craft: codify standards for journey mapping, service blueprinting, systems mapping, experience principles, and measurement frameworks; steward craft excellence alongside peer Directors in Design Strategy and Quant/Qual Research.
Coach and grow designers and researchers; institute critique rituals, mentoring, and learning pathways.
Drive insights to action
Translate research (quant and qual) into actionable strategies, opportunity backlogs, and solution concepts; ensure hypotheses are validated via experiments and pilots; anchor decisions in customer desirability and business viability.
Champion data-informed service design and business case storytelling to help secure alignment and funding.
Partner & Deliver
Partner with Product Design to collaboratively develop low-fidelity and high-fidelity testable prototypes that make desirable future state journeys/ blueprints tangible and inspiring for business stakeholders.
Work with cross-functional leaders in operations, marketing, the group benefits business, and AI to remove friction and enable journey orchestration at scale.
Governance & Ways of Working
Co-create with your director colleagues, a framework for governance for journey ownership, backlog intake, prioritization, and outcome tracking.
Required Qualifications:
Bachelor’s Degree in Service Design, Human-Centred Design, Business, or a related field.
10+ years experience in Service Design roles within financial services, complex organizations, or regulated businesses.
5+ years leading teams and practices in complex environments (financial services preferred).
Demonstrated expertise in service design,…
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