Innovation Specialist at U.S. Bank in Minneapolis, MN

Job description

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 wit