Lead UX_UI Designer

📍 Job Overview

Job Title: Lead UX/UI Designer

Company: Caterpillar Inc.

Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States

Job Type: Full time

Category: Digital & Technology / Design Operations

Date Posted: July 29, 2026

Experience Level: 10+ years

🚀 Role Summary

• Lead the overall design vision and strategy for eCommerce product teams, ensuring a cohesive and customer-centric user experience.

• Drive the creation of foundational experience artifacts, including journey maps and personas, in close collaboration with user research and insights teams.

• Facilitate and lead design workshops with cross-functional teams, synthesizing business goals, product requirements, industry best practices, and user insights.

• Manage and conduct design reviews and critiques to validate proposed design solutions against vision, requirements, architecture, and established design systems.

• Coordinate design efforts across multiple designers and workstreams, proactively identifying and mitigating potential impacts from upcoming releases or parallel initiatives.

📝 Enhancement Note: While the job title is "Lead UX/UI Designer," the responsibilities and context provided by Caterpillar Inc. (a heavy machinery and technology company with a strong digital arm, Cat Digital) strongly suggest a role that bridges pure design execution with operational oversight and strategic alignment within a large, complex organization. This role will likely involve significant collaboration with product management, engineering, and business stakeholders to ensure design initiatives are effectively integrated into the broader GTM and product development processes. The emphasis on "design vision," "coordinating work," and "advocating for design work to business leaders" indicates a strategic operations component.

📈 Primary Responsibilities

• Champion and advocate for the eCommerce design vision and strategy to business leaders and stakeholders across the organization.

• Lead and facilitate design thinking workshops, bringing together diverse perspectives to define product requirements, business goals, and user needs.

• Develop comprehensive end-to-end customer journey maps, user personas, and other key experience artifacts to inform design decisions.

• Participate actively in the UX design intake process, assessing project scope, complexity, and necessary design resources and investment.

• Support cross-functional teams in aligning scope, timelines, dependencies, and stakeholder expectations for various design initiatives.

• Conduct rigorous design reviews and critiques, ensuring proposed solutions meet functional requirements, align with the overall design vision, and adhere to existing architecture and design systems.

• Proactively identify and manage potential impacts of new releases or concurrent projects on design efforts, coordinating with other designers.

• Track Quality Assurance (QA) builds to identify and flag potential fidelity risks early, collaborating with engineering teams to resolve design-related issues.

• Monitor post-launch evaluation metrics and user feedback to support continuous refinement and optimization of eCommerce experiences.

📝 Enhancement Note: The responsibilities highlight a blend of strategic leadership, tactical execution, and operational coordination. The role requires not only creative design skills but also the ability to manage design processes, align stakeholders, and ensure design quality through rigorous reviews and QA. This is indicative of a "Design