Lead UX Operations Manager

About Target: 

Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life. We bring that vision to life through our values and culture. Learn more about Target here.

Target UX is a group of design, content, research, and accessibility practitioners and experts, with a passion for improving and innovating our digital experiences for Target’s guests, team members, and partners. Here, we pride ourselves on designing tangible, inspiring, and impactful solutions that serve all aspects of our business– and being a part of the team means you will play a critical role for Target’s digital experience by increasing ease, simplicity, value, and delight for every touchpoint.

About the role:

As a Lead UX Operations Manager focused on Portfolio Operations, you’ll be responsible for driving alignment and visibility across the entire UX organization. You will design and implement scalable systems, frameworks, and reporting practices that allow UX leaders and teams to track work, prioritize efforts, and articulate impact in alignment with enterprise goals.This role requires deep experience in program and portfolio management, tooling (e.g., Jira, Smartsheet), and operational storytelling through data. As a key connector across UX, Product, and Tech, you’ll help scale and structure the way UX is integrated across business priorities—and that stakeholders have a clear view into progress and outcomes. While this is an individual contributor role, you will lead through influence and collaborate across UX Operations and cross-functional teams to establish best practices that scale.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the evolution of systems and tools (e.g., Jira, Smartsheet) for tracking UX work across teams and pyramids.
• Establishing a clear scheme of design delivery, helping to decide who needs to see the work, and when they need to see it
• Act as a connector across disciplines, within the triad of UX, product and design, to ensure clarity in process, expectations, and outcomes.
• Define and implement frameworks to assess the impact of UX work —across both product outcomes and team performance.
• Leading the developing and ongoing refinement of a framework that would optimize day-to-day workflow—maximizing engagement and reducing duplicated efforts
• Enable storytelling through data by developing dashboards and reporting cadences that demonstrate how UX contributes to enterprise goals.
• Tracking and actively sharing out to key stakeholders across the enterprise in order to increase the awareness of the impact of our work in order to ensure ongoing adherence to our processes and engagement with our team from key partners.
• Collaborate with other UX Ops peers to establish consistent operational strategies across all disciplines.
• Leading and contributing to the process for the team that drives the standardization, interpretation, and guardianship of Target’s design operations

About you:

• 7+years of experience in digital software product work, with inhouse or agency product design teams
• A portfolio featuring program management and/or design operations work
• Strong experience with tools such as Jira, Smartsheet, and other project/portfolio management systems.
• Demonstrated knowledge of UX design processes and best practices
• Proven track record in leading the process among peers to improve team best practices to continue to scale and improve the operations function within the organization
• Ability to work on multiple, high profile workstreams at once; Managing prioritization, execution and stakeholder/leader management to complete work and deliver results on time
• Able to work well in a large organization with many partners, with a demonstrated track record of building deep relationships and influencing peers and leaders
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity, managing multiple stakeholders, and leading cross-functional initiatives.
• Strong communication skills to be able to articulate and defend design decisions with grace, logic and data
• Passionate about building processes that empower teams, not burden them.
• Exhibit a growth mindset