Design Business Partner
| Posting date: | 13 November 2025 |
|---|---|
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 13 December 2025 |
| Location: | Manchester, M3 3AP |
| Company: | NatWest Group |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | R-00267826-OTHLOC-GBR-5FMAN096 |
Summary
Join us as a Design Business Partner
- We’ll look to you to champion the value of Human-Centred Design (HCD) within the business by shaping strategic design efforts, building strong partnerships, and enabling delivery of impactful, collaborative, high-quality design work
- You’ll lead the relationship between HCD and one or more business areas as a trusted partner from briefing to delivery, maintaining a clear and aligned pipeline of design work
- This is a high-profile role where you’ll build and manage strong stakeholder relationships across complex environments
- This is a remote-first role, so you’ll spend most of your time at home, working with your team digitally and coming into the office at least once a week when you need to collaborate closely with your colleagues
What you'll do
This key role will see you working with aligned business areas to understand the work, context and intended business and customer outcomes, ensuring alignment to design and brand standards and franchise OKRs. You’ll build and maintain a strong understanding of your business area’s vision, strategy, propositions and backlog, overseeing the full lifecycle from briefing through to delivery.
As a trusted partner, you’ll collaboratively brief, define the scope and work, bringing teams together with the right capabilities and capacity.
You’ll also:
- Shape and scope design and research briefs in collaboration with SMEs and stakeholders
- Ensure design work is strategically aligned with business goals and customer needs, delivering commercial impact
- Maintain oversight of the work from briefing to delivery, evaluating and communicating value and impact
- Work closely with HCD leadership to manage resource and proactively mitigate risks
- Create and maintain visibility across all HCD initiatives to support alignment, prioritisation, and the avoidance of duplication
- Contribute to and produce PI plans that align design activities with agreed priorities and delivery milestones
The skills you'll need
We’re on the lookout for an expert design thinker with deep understanding of Human-Centred Design disciplines including UX, research, content strategy, and visual design. You’ll have experience managing multiple workstreams and priorities within capacity, capability and budget constraints, actively managing risk and issues while balancing customer needs with business feasibility and viability.
You’ll also need:
- Experience in facilitating workshops, aligning stakeholders, creating design briefs and contributing to roadmap and prioritisation discussions using HCD best practices
- A strong track record of collaborating with stakeholders, building trusted relationships, and navigating complex environments
- To be skilled in persuasive storytelling and confidently pitching the value of design to influence strategic decisions
- Experience working with large-scale digital estates and multi-disciplinary teams
- Familiarity with Agile methodologies and working across multiple projects
- A background in a design-related discipline such as product design, HCI, psychology, or digital optimisation