Lead User Experience Strategist

Role Overview

We are seeking a seasoned UX strategist who thrives in ambiguity and excels at shaping clear, actionable experience strategy. This role leads strategic thinking across the double diamond, with a strong focus on defining problem spaces and guiding teams toward the right solutions.

You will partner closely with product managers and product owners to ensure UX strategy is tightly aligned to product strategy, helping teams focus on the highest-value opportunities. You will create and evolve a clear UX vision, while guiding teams through experimentation and learning to refine that vision over time.

At its core, this role is about driving meaningful client outcomes, shaping experiences that help clients build positive financial behaviors and improve their financial well-being.

Responsibilities:

Define Problems and Shape Strategy

Lead problem framing by synthesizing research, analytics, business context, and stakeholder input. Translate insights into clear experience strategies that define direction, priorities, and intended outcomes. Ensure teams remain anchored to the right problems and aligned on what success looks like.

Drive Clarity and Alignment Across Teams

Bring clarity to complex spaces by articulating strategy, rationale, and tradeoffs in ways that teams can understand and act on. Partner closely with product managers, product owners, design, behavioral science, research and content to align UX strategy with product strategy and guide decision-making.

Guide Exploration and Evolve the Vision

Establish a clear UX vision while enabling teams to learn their way forward. Support hypothesis-driven exploration, helping teams test how experience decisions influence client behavior. Continuously refine strategy and direction based on new insights, feedback, and outcomes.

Navigate Complexity and Drive Decisions

Manage competing inputs, feedback, and priorities across multiple stakeholders. Apply systems thinking to connect the full experience, and make recommendations that balance user needs, business goals, and technical realities while maintaining a strong client-first perspective.

Enable Progress Through Collaboration

Act as an informal UX leader, facilitating alignment, managing milestones, unblocking teams, and building momentum in ambiguous spaces. Lead working sessions and partner across functions to ensure strategy translates into practical, executable direction.

Leverage AI to Increase Speed to Learning

Use AI tools to synthesize inputs, explore directions, and prototype quickly so teams can test ideas earlier and make faster, more informed decisions.

What Success Looks Like

• Problem spaces are clearly defined and consistently guide team decisions

• UX strategy is tightly aligned with product strategy and actively used to prioritize work

• Teams have a clear vision, but adapt quickly based on learning and experimentation

• Complex inputs are translated into clear, confident recommendations

• Strong cross-functional alignment enables teams to move with focus and speed

• Experiences drive positive client behavior change and improved financial outcomes

• Strategy translates into practical, feasible experiences delivered to market

• UX team timelines and milestones are well-defined and actively managed, helping teams stay aligned and make steady progress against strategic priorities

Qualifications:

• Eight years related work experience, three years of User Experience or User Interface experience.
• Undergraduate degree or equivalent combination of training and experience in a creative or technical field. Graduate degree preferred.

Special Factors

Sponsorship
Vanguard is not offering visa sponsorship for this position.

About Vanguard

At Vanguard, we don't just have a mission-we're on a mission.

To work for the long-term financial wellbeing of our clients. To lead through product and services that transform our clients' lives. To learn and develop our skills as individuals and as a team. From Malvern to Melbourne, our mission drives us forward and inspires us to be our best.

How We Work

Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members, designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long-term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience.