Director – Experience Research & Strategy

Job Description:

We are seeking talented, passionate, and multifaceted generalists with deep service design, strategy, and research experience alongside proven business savvy to help lead our team of researchers, service designers, and experience strategists.

In this role you will help manage and grow our team while also helping our clients understand, envision, and execute human centered experience strategies. This includes the execution of research methods spanning from ambiguous and strategic to tactical and evaluative, and applying service design thinking to understand the experience ecosystem, define the “fuzzy front end” of experience innovation, and communicate a strategic vision for subsequent design and development efforts.

If you are curious, collaborative, confident, and an experienced leader with high emotional intelligence and a passion for empowering others, you might be Mad*Pow’s next addition.

This is a full-time position located in either Boston, MA or Portsmouth, NH. While we embrace a flexible working arrangement and all employees are currently working from home, we expect candidates for this role to commute to either our Boston or Portsmouth office regularly, once in-person collaboration resumes.

YOU WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR:

• Organizational Leadership:
  • Managing internal strategists and/or researchers with diverse skills and career paths
  • Collaborating with senior leadership to define and support team vision while providing personal and professional mentorship for direct reports
  • Supporting business development efforts with documentation, scoping, and pitching
  • Modeling successful project leadership for others through direction, delegation, and as a hands-on practitioner working directly with clients
  • Facilitating internal process development efforts
• Practice Delivery & Leadership:
  • Leading project teams in the execution of experience research to understand unmet needs, frustrations, and behavioral motivations and translating those findings to relevant business & experience insights,
  • Leading project teams to understand and articulate pain points and opportunities within existing experiences, and collaborating with relevant stakeholders to define and articulate new experiences that reflect a deep understanding of human behavior through participatory design, service design, and experience strategy methods; this includes the visual communication of business ecosystems, customer experiences, operational processes, and strategic roadmaps
  • Communication of complex ideas in a manner easy for others to grasp, including storytelling and presentation skills suitable for internal knowledge sharing, external thought leadership, and client audiences from junior to C-suite individuals
  • Coordinating project activities, managing team resourcing, internal and external communication with client teams and general project management

Experience and Skills

QUALITIES WE ARE LOOKING FOR:

• 7+ years of relevant experience in business or design strategy, UX, service design, research, or related fields, including significant time in an agency, consulting, or professional services environments
• Experience managing a multidisciplinary team of design strategy and/or research practitioners with proven ability to empower teams in aligned autonomy
• A growth mindset and flexible optimism that enables you to be adaptable and collaborative, bringing resiliency and tenacity to thrive in ambiguous situations
• Demonstrated proficiency with:
  • Ability to clearly articulate the connection from research insights to actionable design & strategy decisions through storytelling and effective client presentations
  • Common experience strategy & service design methods such as: persona development, narrative storyboarding, ecosystem mapping, experience journey mapping, service blueprinting, jobs to be done, conceptual modeling, value proposition design, and touchpoint concepting via UX flows, screen sketching, physical & service prototyping
  • Common research methods such as: competitive landscape analysis, heuristic analysis, literature reviews, experience audits, contextual inquiry & related ethnographic methods, diary studies, experience interviewing, task analysis, surveys, and lab-based, field-based, and remote usability studies
  • The wisdom to know what tools to apply when, and why
  • Bonus points for proficiency in futures thinking & strategic foresight, systems thinking, data science, and/or behavioral science
• Ability to clearly articulate the connection from research insights to actionable design & strategy decisions through storytelling and effective client presentations
• Ability to facilitate client meetings, workshops, and other collaborative working sessions
• Proven experience as a connector and relationship-builder whom clients and internal colleagues enjoy working with
• Strategic and creative thinking skills with the curiosity to stay abreast of shifting best practices and industry dynamics
• Agency or consulting experience with demonstrated understanding of professional services environments that focus on providing value for clients in balance with human centered innovation
• Willingness to dress up once in a while and impress our clients, with occasional travel when safe in-person collaboration resumes
• An authentic passion for what you do and for sharing it with others

The seniority and final list of responsibilities of this position will be flexible based on what background experiences and perspectives each candidate brings to the position.