Head of Product Design - Banking

In 1954, Eero Saarinen designed a bank with glass walls, no offices, and a completely open floor plan in Columbus, Indiana. It was surrounded by trees; the furniture was made by Herman Miller; the lobby flooring was thick, rustic brick. It was built with transparency and community at its core.

Since then, a lot of things have happened—Saarinen’s bank is now a conference center, people increasingly live on the internet, and it’s hard to think of a single financial institution that still applies design thinking to their company.

Mercury is on a mission to defy those expectations. We’re a financial technology company that helps startups spend less time banking* and more time building. We believe that the key to our success revolves around thoughtful design and we’re looking for a Design Manager for our Banking Group, to define product strategy for the org, support execution in product teams, and help designers grow. You’ll be a key part of a team whose work is massively impactful to the core of our product.

Our design team consists of 30+ people who love to solve complex problems through design, and are equally passionate about guiding and inspiring each other through their work.

*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust®; Members FDIC.

In this role, you’ll:

• Understand our product, business, brand, and processes inside and out. Once you know how it all works, you’ll help us come up with ways to improve.
• Deeply understand the Banking Product space and work with the executive team, cross-functional partners, and your teams to shape strategy for the group.
• Build strong relationships with direct cross functional partners and with other groups at Mercury, and use those relationships to empower your teams to do great work.
• Know your team and help them grow. Use 1:1s to provide coaching and mentorship, come up with structures to help prioritize work, and make sure every person on your team thrives.
• Make your team feel like a Team. Organize workshops, share inspo, and encourage collaborative projects that make our remote, distributed group feel less remote and distributed.
• Document and evangelize what works (design systems, team meetings, internal processes), and ditch what doesn’t.
• Create an environment where people feel comfortable pushing back on work that doesn’t hit the mark, and model radical candor with feedback that’s provocative rather than prescriptive.
• Help us hire more great people.

There are a lot of paths that could lead you to a role like this, so we encourage you to apply even if you’re not sure. Some relevant skills that can help:

• You’ve worked in Fintech, in the Banking space, or in other highly regulated and / or complex industries.
• You’ve led a design team of any size for 8 years or more.
• You can decisively manage execution in your teams, untangle execution challenges, and enable your team to ship high quality work with speed.
• You have experience driving strategy for product groups, aligning stakeholders on a vision, and evangelizing the work that your teams are doing to the broader company.
• You’re good at wrangling ambiguity and finding ways to improve the world around you, even when nobody’s told you to do so.
• You can tell when you’ve hit on the right amount of process/structure without it feeling stifling or unnecessary.
• You’ve provided mentorship to designers, coached them, and helped them grow in their skills.
• You keep up on design trends and like to stay in practice, even if it’s been a while since you were an individual contributor.
• You can tell when and why something’s good and articulate clearly (and kindly) when it’s not.
• You can drive design team processes such as design critiques, and are able to guide the team to ask the right questions to elevate the quality of the user experience.

The total rewards package at Mercury includes base salary, equity (stock options), and benefits.

Our salary and equity ranges are highly competitive within the SaaS and fintech industry and are updated regularly using the most reliable compensation survey data for our industry. New hire offers are made based on a candidate’s experience, expertise, geographic location, and internal pay equity relative to peers.

Our target new hire base salary ranges for this role are the following:

• US employees (any location): $250,700 - $294,900

• Canadian employees (any location): CAD 228,100 - 268,400

We use Covey as part of our hiring and / or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT. As part of the evaluation process we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound on January 22, 2024.

Please see the independent bias audit report covering our use of Covey here.