Director, Design - Global Design System

Global Design System Strategy & Leadership

• Define and implement a scalable, enterprise-grade design system that supports Manulife’s digital transformation across all regions, advocating for design excellence, accessibility, and usability.

• Define the visual language, interaction patterns, and usability guidelines that ensure a high-quality experience for millions of users.

• Balance global standardization with regional flexibility, ensuring usability across diverse markets and regulatory landscapes.

• Partner with executive leadership, product, and engineering teams to align the design system with business priorities.

Governance, Adoption & Enablement

• Establish governance models, contribution frameworks, and adoption strategies to ensure system sustainability.

• Lead cross-functional alignment, ensuring the design system is embedded into product design workflows across global teams.

• Define design principles, usage guidelines, and best practices to ensure consistency and scalability.

• Optimize for multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and multi-regulatory challenges, ensuring designs can be localized and adapted without breaking system integrity.

• Facilitate design reviews, audits, and contribution models, ensuring high-quality system evolution and usage.

• Establish and oversee training, onboarding, and community engagement initiatives to drive system adoption across Manulife’s digital teams.

• Develop and track KPIs that measure adoption, efficiency gains, and business impact.

Cross-Functional Leadership & Stakeholder Influence

• Serve as a primary design system advocate, navigating organizational complexity to influence decision-making at all levels.

• Partner with regional design leads to ensure the system meets regional needs while maintaining overall consistency.

• Cultivate collaboration between design, engineering, and product management teams, ensuring smooth integration into digital workflows.

• Build and cultivate a global design system community, mentoring teams on best practices and fostering a culture of design system ownership.

Technical & Operational Execution

• Own the evolution of design tooling, documentation, and workflows, ensuring sflawlessintegration enterprise platforms (Figma, Storybook, React, Angular, etc).

• Work closely with engineering leadership to ensure design-to-code consistency, accessibility compliance (WCAG), and performance optimization.

• Maintain a structured backlog of design system updates, prioritizing enhancements based on business needs and user feedback.

• Identify and handle external partnerships and vendors as needed to support system expansion.

What motivates you?

• You obsess about customers, listen, engage and act for their benefit.

• You think big, with curiosity to discover ways to use your agile approach and enable business outcomes.

• You thrive in teams and enjoy getting things done together.

• You take ownership and build solutions, focusing on what matters.

• You do what is right, work with integrity and speak up.

• You share your humanity, helping us build a diverse and inclusive work environment for everyone.

What we are looking for

• 10+ years of experience in UX leadership, design systems, or enterprise product design, preferably within a global enterprise or multi-jurisdictional organization.

• Consistent track record of building and scaling enterprise design systems within large, global organizations, balancing standardization with regional/local adaptation.

• Deep expertise in UI/UX best practices, accessibility (WCAG), design systems, and design-to-development collaboration.

• Experience with governance models, adoption strategies, and design system operations.

• Experience working in complex matrixed organizations with multiple business units and partners.

• Exceptional collaborator management, influence, and communication skills - able to influence senior collaborators, drive alignment, and advocate for design at an executive level.

• Hands-on experience with enterprise design tools and frameworks (Figma, Storybook, React, Angular, JIRA, Confluence, etc.).

• Familiarity with Agile, Lean UX, and enterprise digital delivery models.

• Experience navigating multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and regulatory complexities in global design and content.

What can we offer you?

• A competitive salary and benefits packages.

• A growth trajectory that extends upward and outward, encouraging you to follow your passions and learn new skills.

• A focus on growing your career path with us.

• Flexible work policies and strong work-life balance.

• Professional development and leadership opportunities.

Our commitment to you

• Values-first culture

• We lead with our Values every day and bring them to life together.

• Boundless opportunity

• We create opportunities to learn and grow at every stage of your career.

• Continuous innovation

• We invite you to help redefine the future of financial services.

• Delivering the promise of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

• We foster an inclusive workplace where everyone thrives.

• Championing Corporate Citizenship

• We build a business that benefits all collaborators and has a positive social and environmental impact.

#LI-Hybrid