Vanguard UX Roles and Responsibilities
Vanguard embraces two equally important career paths, People Leadership and Thought Leadership. People Leaders have direct reports and act as mentors to their teams, communicating and coordinating with other leaders and executives throughout the organization. Thought Leaders, on the other hand, dedicate their time, energy, and professional development to advancing the practice of their chosen discipline. Broadly, this discipline is User Experience, or UX. The Thought Leadership career path at Vanguard includes four primary UX roles: Strategist, Designer, Content Strategist, and Researcher
The Roles
UX Strategists are a team’s guide, navigating toward long-term goals. While strategists take different approaches and employ diverse methods, they ultimately have the same high-level responsibility of identifying objectives and questions to be answered in collaboration with Content Strategists and Researchers. Strategists identify objectives and define plans with both Content Strategists and UX Research. It ideally should be a collaborative effort. They guide the definition of the North Star vision and strive to keep it in their fellow lab members’ focus. They also distill insights into viable opportunities and plan, lead, and execute design thinking approaches to finding innovative solutions.
UX Designers own the overall look and feel of interaction patterns and UI designs. From visual to experience design, they use their understanding of the Vanguard brand design guidelines and industry best practices to iterate rapidly based on research, data, and testing feedback to create the most delightful experiences. They are the visual workhorses of Vanguard.
UX Content Strategists own the planning, development, and management of content at Vanguard — including written words, images, and multimedia. They understand, create, and deploy the right content and the right experience, to the right person at the right time via the right channel to affect the right impact. Content Strategist uses content to deliver strategic solutions to user problems and needs. They collaborate with Strategists, Researchers, and Designers to strategically support, guide, and inform users, emotionally and intellectually, in key moments that matter in their journey.
UX Researchers work to provide the answers that guide decision-making by getting to know our clients’ needs and wants. They articulate research questions, goals, and tradeoffs in partnership with the other UX disciplines. They work to understand problems from the business and client perspectives, select appropriate inquiry methods for gathering insights, and formulate inquiries. They also identify the relevant audience for research via recruiting and sampling.
The Responsibilities
The Vanguard UX disciplines work across a shared set of primary skills, which exist across five major categories:
Research — qualitative and quantitative research and how to synthesize the information
Business — business sense, justification, and prioritization
Design — visual/interactive design and design visioning
Leadership — project management and building stakeholder relationships
Technical — technical acumen with a focus on Vanguard technology and innovative trends
Viewing each skill through the lens of their chosen UX discipline allows Vanguard UX crew to find innovative and transformational ways of collaborating while creating the best possible client experience.
Skills within each UX discipline are distributed across a series of levels. Advancing through the levels is how we track professional growth and development. Crew career-pathing conversations are guided by skillset evaluations with five assessment levels currently applied:
Awareness — I have worked alongside teammates
Proficient — I have done this successfully and consistently
Advanced — I have done this in multiple complex situations
Mastery — I could teach and demonstrate expertise
Leader — I am recognized as an expert in the organization
This structure allows crew to focus on driving outcomes for our clients and have an increased impact on our labs, journey families, and Vanguard’s UX practice.
If you have questions about Vanguard UX, our lab structure, or how you could be part of our team, send us an email or check out our open roles.
