Job Description

Title: Design Thinking Strategist 

Location: Charlotte, NC(Hybrid)
Pay:  $85/hr W2
Duration:  12 Months

Description:

In this role, you will serve as a human-centered design leader, helping product and project teams discover new possibilities and business efficiencies and deliver products that employees love and that drive value to the business. This leader has a deep empathy for users, while also understanding business and technology, in order to help your team solve problems creatively and holistically.

Through your creative partnership with product teams you will ensure clear problem framing, help your teams dream big and deliver on their dreams; design experiments to validate assumptions and deliver great end-to-end product solutions.

You may also sit at the portfolio level to help your business partners align behind a vision and integrate a portfolio of products and projects with deliverable business value, on time and on budget.

You will work with talented UX/UI designers to ensure the design aligns with user research findings and follows UX best practices. You will also work closely with change management and product analyst to ensure your solutions are adopted and impact is measured. Through your coaching, consulting, and thought leadership, you will help your product team and business partners learn human-centered design practices so they understand how a human centered approach to product design contributes to well adopted and impactful products and processes and can carry forward human-centered design approaches to solve other business problems. You will support the design community through your thought leadership, engagement, and peer mentoring.

• Serve as primary design consultant and creative strategy leader, serving as central point-of-contact for a project team, product partners, and decision-makers, including sponsors and stakeholders from the business.

• Deliver various artifacts like journey maps, personas and other items to communicate user needs and potential value to larger product team and various stakeholders.

• Structure and facilitate workshops for problem framing, user research and defining and prioritize business and product goals, solution concepts and features.

• Connect regularly with related product teams to support new feature development and business strategy. Leverage design thinking at the portfolio level to find value across various related project and product teams.

• Work closely with change management to uncover user pain points and potential areas of resistance in order to understand business risks and foster better product adoption

• Be comfortable and proven in the following:

• Understanding users - Discovering needs and perceiving emerging user behaviors
• Understanding business - Helping our clients find new opportunities and connecting business requirements with user requirements
• Understanding technology - knowledgeable and curious about new technologies, and being able to see them from fresh and user-oriented perspective
• Hands-on research expertise – Designing and executing ethnographic and other qualitative methods to quantitative research methods
• Product development - Identifying and delivering on growth opportunities based on user needs and potential benefits
• On time and on budget delivery within the constraints of your assignment.

SKILLS

Plan and Facilitate | Lead both research efforts to better understand people and their environments. Analyze and synthesize research into actionable insights and recommendations. Structure and lead workshops that use research insights to  define business and product goals, roadmaps and potential features. Leverage user stories, storyboards, personas and journey maps and other artifacts to make your ideas clearly understood

Team Player | Collaborative maker with experience creating psychologically safe environments where people can innovate You coach to product mindset, lean into healthy conflict, articulate problems and solutions clearly, striving for alignment.


Experimenter | Embraces the unknown with a bias towards action in ambiguous environments. You roll up your sleeves, explore new ideas rather that rely on existing paradigms, and bring Ideas to life

Collaborate | Work closely and iteratively with both users/customers and internal, interdisciplinary teams including Product Designers, Product Owners, Agilist and Technologists. You'll be helping the team define the product vision and roadmap to help the team align on direction. Additionally, you will be comfortable managing stakeholders, sponsors and other leaders at the portfolio level.

TACTICAL RESPONSIBILITIES

• Lead problem framing to ensure problems are effectively articulated and prioritized.
• Create strategy, execute and synthesize research to inform business strategy and drive decisions based on user research insights
• Potentially sit at the portfolio level to help your business partners craft strategic vision. Partner with business to validate business ideas in order to reduce risk.
• Use user research to ensure consistent experience across products and portfolio's
• Assist with determining scope, as well as validating assumptions made when identifying solutions.