Director, Platform Experience & Capability Design

Your Role

The Director, Platform Experience & Capability Design translates business strategy, customer and employee journeys, and operational needs into reusable enterprise capabilities and experience designs. This leader establishes design direction, capability frameworks, and solution intent to align business and technology teams on outcomes before delivery begins.

Leading the Platform Experience & Capability Design COE, the Director oversees product ownership, platform strategy, engineering alignment, operations, governance, and value realization across Salesforce, Pega, SmartComms, and MHK. The role drives an integrated platform strategy that increases reuse, accelerates speed-to-value, reduces duplication and technical debt, and enables automation and AI adoption, while building high-performing teams and a culture of continuous learning.

Our leadership model is about developing great leaders at all levels and creating opportunities for our people to grow – personally, professionally, and financially. We are looking for leaders that are energized by creative and critical thinking, building and sustaining high-performing teams, getting results the right way, and fostering continuous learning.

Responsibilities

Your Work 

In this role, you will: 

• Develop and execute a 1–3-year functional strategy and roadmap for platform experience and capability design. Translate business priorities, customer and employee journeys, and platform direction into actionable capability plans and design priorities
• Lead the creation of journey maps, process models, capability maps, service blueprints, content and communication patterns, and solution-intent artifacts that clarify the future state and guide product and delivery teams
• Identify opportunities to standardize and reuse capabilities across lines of business, channels, workflows, and platforms. Establish design principles and patterns that improve consistency, scalability, maintainability, and speed to value
• Partner with strategy, product, business, finance, and technology leaders to shape demand, evaluate options, define outcomes, and recommend priorities. Ensure initiatives have clear problem statements, target experiences, capability requirements, measurable outcomes, and viable operating impacts before delivery
• Coordinate experience and capability design across Salesforce, SmartCOMM, Pega, MHK, and related platforms so solutions work as an integrated ecosystem rather than isolated point solutions. Surface cross-platform dependencies and design tradeoffs early
• Establish practical design standards, review mechanisms, decision rights, and quality criteria. Confirm that designs consider accessibility, privacy, security, regulatory, operational, data, architecture, content, and change-readiness needs in partnership with accountable subject matter experts
• Serve as the primary design partner to business and platform leaders. Facilitate complex decisions, synthesize competing needs, and communicate recommendations in clear executive-ready language
• Lead, coach, and develop a multidisciplinary team. Set objectives, clarify roles, manage performance, plan capacity, recruit talent as needed, and build consistent practices across journey, process, capability, content, and product design
• Define and monitor measures such as design cycle time, reuse, stakeholder satisfaction, adoption, quality, rework reduction, and contribution to business outcomes. Use feedback and performance data to improve methods and team effectiveness
• Manage design and consulting partners within the function, including scope, quality, performance, deliverables, and knowledge transfer, in coordination with sourcing and vendor-management partners

Qualifications

Your Knowledge and Experience

• Bachelor's degree or high school diploma plus four additional years of relevant experience in lieu of a degree
• 10 years of relevant experience in product management, experience design, service design, business capability design, business architecture, process transformation, platform strategy, or a closely related discipline
• 6 years of people-management experience with direct responsibility for supervising, coaching, developing, and evaluating employees.  Inclusive of a leadership profile that includes:
  • Customer- and employee-centered, with a practical focus on measurable business and operational outcomes
  • A systems thinker who connects journeys, processes, content, data, platforms, people, and controls
  • A clear and credible communicator who can simplify complexity without losing substance
  • A collaborative leader who builds alignment across business and technology while preserving clear accountability
  • A disciplined people leader who develops talent, sets standards, and creates a culture of learning, reuse, and continuous improvement
  • Comfortable moving between strategy and execution, while maintaining the scope and decision rights appropriate to a Director role
• Broad management knowledge to lead a centralized function and cross-functional project teams, with mastery-level knowledge of platform experience and capability design and a broad understanding of adjacent business and technology disciplines
• Demonstrated experience translating complex business needs and journeys into scalable capabilities, product direction, process designs, or service models
• Experience leading work across enterprise platforms or complex technology ecosystems. Experience with Salesforce, SmartCOMM, Pega, MHK, CRM, workflow/case management, correspondence, marketing technology, or healthcare platforms is strongly valued
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior leaders, facilitate complex decisions, manage ambiguity, and communicate strategy, options, tradeoffs, and recommendations to technical and non-technical audiences
• Working knowledge of product management, human-centered design, service design, process improvement, agile delivery, change management, and value realization
• Strong business acumen, critical thinking, financial and operational judgment, risk awareness, and decision-making skills
• Healthcare payer, provider, regulated industry, or other complex enterprise experience, preferred
• Experience establishing design systems, capability taxonomies, service blueprints, product discovery practices, or reusable enterprise patterns, preferred
• Experience partnering with architecture and engineering teams to connect business capability intent with technology roadmaps and delivery, preferred
• Experience leading organizational or operating-model change and building a new or maturing function, preferred

 

Hybrid 

This role requires employees to be in-office based on our hybrid workplace model, balancing purposeful in-person collaboration with flexibility. For most teams, this means coming into the office two days each week.

Employees living more than 50 miles from an office location will work with their manager to determine in-office time based on business need.

 

About the team

About Blue Shield of California

As of January 2025, Blue Shield of California became a subsidiary of Ascendiun. Ascendiun is a nonprofit corporate entity that is the parent to a family of organizations including Blue Shield of California and its subsidiary, Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan; Altais, a clinical services company; and Stellarus, a company designed to scale healthcare solutions. Together, these organizations are referred to as the Ascendiun Family of Companies. 

At Blue Shield of California, our mission is to create a healthcare system worthy of our family and friends and sustainably affordable. We are transforming health care in a way that genuinely serves our nonprofit mission by lowering costs, improving quality, and enhancing the member and physician experience. 

To achieve our mission, we foster an environment where all employees can thrive and contribute fully to address the needs of the various communities we serve. We are committed to creating and maintaining a supportive workplace that upholds our values and advances our goals.

Blue Shield is a U.S. News Best Company to work for, a Deloitte U.S. Best Managed Company and a Top 100 Inspiring Workplace. We were recognized by Fair360 as a Top Regional Company, and one of the 50 most community-minded companies in the United States by Points of Light. Here at Blue Shield, we strive to make a positive change across our industry and communities – join us!  

Our Values: 

• Honest. We hold ourselves to the highest ethical and integrity standards. We build trust by doing what we say we're going to do and by acknowledging and correcting where we fall short. 
• Human. We strive to listen and communicate effectively, showing empathy by understanding others' perspectives.
• Courageous. We stand up for what we believe in and are committed to the hard work necessary to achieve our ambitious goals. 

Our Workplace Model 

We believe in fostering a workplace environment that balances purposeful in-person collaboration with flexibility - providing clear expectations while respecting the diverse needs of our workforce. Our workplace model is designed around intentional in-person interaction, collaboration, connection, creativity and flexibility:

• For most teams, this means coming into the office two days per week.

• Employees living more than 50 miles from an office location, out of state employees, and employees in certain member-facing roles should work with their manager to determine in-office time based on business need.

• For employees with medical conditions that may impact their ability to work in-office, we are committed to engaging in an interactive process and providing reasonable accommodations to ensure their work environment is conducive to their success and well-being.

The Company reserves the right to require more presence in the office based on business needs, and requirements are subject to change with periodic reviews.  

Physical Requirements:

Office Environment - roles involving part to full time schedule in Office Environment. Based in our physical offices and work from home office/deskwork - Activity level: Sedentary, frequency most of work day.

Please click here for further physical requirement detail. 

Equal Employment Opportunity:

External hires must pass a background check/drug screen. Qualified applicants with arrest records and/or conviction records will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with Federal, State and local laws, including but not limited to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regards to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, protected veteran status or disability status and any other classification protected by Federal, State and local laws.