Senior User Experience Strategist

Our client, a leader in the QSR space, is looking bring on a Sr. Experience Strategist to join their XD team. Role will be hybrid (3x days/week), with potential to convert to fulltime.

Overview:

As part of the overall XD Team within the Technology function, the Design Research team delivers human-centered digital experiences to customers and crew members across the globe.

This Sr. Experience Strategist should bring curiosity, creativity, rigor, and vision to a net-new experience within our digital ecosystem. Working alongside a wide range of partners including UX design, product management, engineering, marketing, and local market teams, the Sr. Experience Strategist blends design research, experience strategy, and service design to create strategies and inform design decisions that balance customer needs, business objectives, and operational realities.

Core Responsibilities

Strategy Development:

• Develop, articulate, and communicate the strategies for new customer experiences within the digital ecosystem. These strategies may include:
• Purpose and intent, balancing user needs with business goals and tech capabilities
• Experience principles that guide design, content, and delivery
• Supporting evidence from a variety of sources, including primary research with customers, data analytics, past internal research, industry reports, etc.
• Visual and/or informational frameworks that communicate complex strategies and principles in more digestible and memorable format for partners, stakeholders and leadership
• Relevant metrics and KPIs that would indicate performance of the strategy
• Using A/B tests, pilots, or phased rollouts to validate strategy

Research Execution:

• Lead mixed-methods research projects of varying scales and scopes, including:
• Planning research: articulating clear, strong learning objectives, choosing or creating research methods and activities, recruiting participants, developing discussion guides, and collaborating with designers to create stimulus
• Facilitating research: using appropriate methods to achieve learning objectives, and ensuring that research sessions are timely, engaging, productive, fruitful, and occasionally unexpected
• Synthesizing: making sense of the raw research data, transforming it into deep, meaningful, actionable insights and recommendations that drive the experience strategy and inform design decisions

Cross-functional Collaboration:

• Work with designers, researchers, product managers, engineers, and marketers across all aspects of strategy creation, including:
• Establishing and building relationships that position you as a trusted partner and point of contact for your workstream to members of the design, product management, engineering, marketing teams, and beyond
• Championing the customer while being realistic about business goals and operational constraints
• Designing and leading workshops to align partners and stakeholders around customer needs, business goals, and technology realities of potential new experiences
• Articulating and communicating strategies to other stakeholders and leaders across the organization
• Ensuring the strategies are carried through in experience design and delivery

Communication to Partners and Leaders:

• Create engaging presentations, workshops and other mediums that communicate project goals, approach, insights, strategy, and recommendations to senior leaders and cross-functional partners, including:
• Compelling hooks that grab audiences and make them pay attention
• Strong narratives with clear perspective that pull audiences along and leave them wanting more
• Multi-media evidence from research to support insights and recommendations
• Co-authorship and presentation with partners to demonstrate alignment and support from all involved teams

Qualifications

• 5–7 years of professional experience in some combination of experience strategy, design research, UX design, and service design
• Exceptional foundation in human-centered design, with the ability to shape ambiguous problems into executable projects
• Mastery of design research theory and methods with a compulsion to synthesize data into deep, revelatory insights that directly inform strategic direction
• Strong applied systems thinking to balance customer needs, brand considerations, monetization, and operational constraints when shaping experience strategy
• Demonstrated success collaborating with multidisciplinary teams and cross-functional peers/stakeholders (e.g., product managers, designers, engineers, marketing, and other insights teams)
• Comfort influencing senior stakeholders and cross-functional partners through quality work, confident presentation, and strong POV
• Passion for setting standards for highest quality work, including clear articulation of research objectives, discernment in choosing/creating research methods, rigor in synthesis, and clarity in communication of research findings and strategic recommendations
• Excellent communication skills; in particular, the ability to clearly communicate key insights and recommendations to business partners through well-crafted narratives, frameworks, evidence from users, and visions of future user experiences that consider business and tech realities with creative visions for future experiences
• Exceptionally curious with strong collaboration, critical thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills
• An urgency and hunger to immerse in the problem space. We’re not just sitting at our desks—we want to learn and draw inspiration from hospitality experiences at large

Bonus: Familiarity with advertising/marketing campaign strategy, media planning/buying, and performance measurement

If you are interested in and qualified for this role, please forward your resume today!