Innovation Specialist

At U.S. Bank, we’re on a journey to do our best. Helping the customers and businesses we serve to make better and smarter financial decisions and enabling the communities we support to grow and succeed. We believe it takes all of us to bring our shared ambition to life, and each person is unique in their potential. A career with U.S. Bank gives you a wide, ever-growing range of opportunities to discover what makes you thrive at every stage of your career. Try new things, learn new skills and discover what you excel at—all from Day One.

Job Description

Are you naturally curious?

Do you see the world as it might be and wonder, "What if?"

Do you get excited about emerging technologies, changing customer behaviors, market disruption, and new business models?

Do you enjoy turning uncertainty into insight, insight into opportunity, and opportunity into measurable business value?

If so, keep reading.

The Emerging Products team is responsible for identifying, validating, and commercializing new growth opportunities for U.S. Bank. We partner across business lines to discover unmet customer needs, evaluate emerging technologies, develop new business models, and transform promising concepts into scalable products and services.

We are seeking an Innovation Specialist to lead opportunities from initial discovery through commercialization readiness. This role combines customer insight, product management, venture building, business strategy, experimentation, and financial analysis. You will work across the enterprise to identify what is next, determine what is worth pursuing, and help build the evidence required to make informed investment decisions. This role aligns to the Emerging Products team's focus on opportunity discovery, experimentation, commercialization, and business-line partnership.

The ideal candidate is equally comfortable conducting customer research, facilitating executive discussions, developing financial models, building prototypes, testing assumptions, and influencing strategic decisions.

If you're not interested in what's next, this role probably isn't for you.

If you aren't energized by learning, experimentation, and solving ambiguous problems, this role probably isn't for you.

If you thrive on turning ideas into businesses, we'd love to talk.

What You'll Do

Discover New Opportunities

Identify unmet customer needs, emerging trends, regulatory shifts, market disruptions, and technology opportunities.

Conduct customer research, interviews, market analysis, and competitive assessments.

Develop insight-driven opportunity areas aligned to enterprise and business-line priorities.

Continuously monitor developments across fintech, banking, AI, data, identity, payments, wealth, and adjacent industries.

Lead Discovery and Validation

Lead opportunities through the Emerging Products lifecycle, including Explore Backlog, Discovery, Validate, and Accelerate stages.

Build Learning Plans and evidence-based validation strategies.

Design experiments to test customer desirability, technical feasibility, commercial viability, and operational readiness.

Develop and refine value propositions, business models, pricing strategies, and commercialization approaches.

Determine when opportunities should advance, pivot, pause, or stop based on evidence.

Build Concepts and Test Solutions

Lead development of concepts, prototypes, proofs of value, MVPs, pilots, and market tests.

Partner with research, design, engineering, operations, legal, risk, marketing, and business-line stakeholders.

Translate customer needs and market insights into testable solutions.

Establish success metrics and measure outcomes throughout experimentation activities.

Develop Business Cases and Commercialization Strategies

Create business cases supported by customer, competitive, operational, and financial evidence.

Assess TAM, market attractiveness, customer economics, profitability, and growth potential.

Develop executive recommendations and investment proposals.

Partner with business lines to define ownership, funding, scaling strategies, and transition plans.

Influence Enterprise Innovation

Facilitate discussions with senior leaders on emerging opportunities and strategic investments.

Communicate findings, recommendations, and lessons learned through compelling storytelling and executive-ready presentations.

Contribute to the evolution of innovation practices, methodologies, and portfolio management capabilities.

Serve as a trusted advisor on emerging customer needs, technologies, and business opportunities.

Success in This Role

Success is measured by outcomes rather than activity.

Examples include:

Validating significant customer or business opportunities.

Advancing opportunities through the Emerging Products pipeline.

Delivering evidence-based recommendations that improve investment decisions.

Launching successful pilots and commercialization initiatives.

Helping business lines identify new revenue, customer growth, or efficiency opportunities.

Accelerating learning while reducing risk and uncertainty.

Successfully transitioning validated opportunities into scalable businesses or products.

Basic Qualifications

Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience.

4+ years of experience in product management, innovation, strategy, venture development, consulting, research, product marketing, or related fields.

Experience leading initiatives from concept through implementation or commercialization.

Strong analytical, problem-solving, and business case development capabilities.

Experience conducting customer research and translating insights into action.

Excellent written, verbal, facilitation, and presentation skills.

Ability to influence outcomes across complex stakeholder environments.

Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in ambiguity and uncertainty.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience within banking, payments, fintech, wealth management, lending, or related financial services industries.

Experience with Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Jobs to Be Done, Business Model Canvas, and experimentation methodologies.

Demonstrated success bringing new products, services, or capabilities to market.

Experience evaluating emerging technologies and translating technology trends into business opportunities.

AI fluency and familiarity with practical AI applications across customer and business experiences.

• •Strong quantitative skills including forecasting, financial modeling, and opportunity sizing.
• •Experience working within Agile environments.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is:

Customer obsessed.

Naturally curious.

Comfortable challenging assumptions.

A strong researcher and rapid learner.

Highly analytical while remaining creatively minded.

Able to connect customer needs, business strategy, technology capabilities, and financial outcomes.

Energized by experimentation and evidence-based decision making.

Equally comfortable exploring new ideas and executing against measurable outcomes.

Why This Role Matters

The future growth of U.S. Bank will depend on our ability to recognize emerging opportunities before others do, validate them quickly, and convert promising ideas into meaningful customer and business outcomes.

As an Innovation Specialist, you will help shape that future by identifying what is next, determining what matters, and helping the enterprise make smarter investment decisions that create long-term value for customers, business lines, and shareholders.

• Location Expectations:
• This role requires working from a U.S. Bank location three (3) or more days per week.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate a disability during any portion of the application or hiring process, please refer to our disability accommodations for applicants .

Benefits:

Our approach to benefits and total rewards cons