Design Thinking Strategist

Location: Charlotte, NC (Local – Hybrid/Onsite)

Duration: 12 Months

Role Type: W2 Contract Engagement

Description:

In this role, you will serve as a human-centered design leader, helping product, project, and portfolio teams discover new opportunities and to deliver products that people love and that drive business value across the entire product cycle. Our ideal candidate has a deep empathy for users while also understanding business and technology to advocate for the best solutions that consider the business context.

Responsibilities include:

• Act as primary design consultant and creative strategy leader on your team(s), serving as central point-of-contact for project team(s), product partners, and decision-makers, including sponsors and stakeholders from the business.
• Deliver relevant artifacts like journey maps, research synthesis, and other items to communicate user needs and potential opportunity to larger product team and various stakeholders.
• As necessary, create and facilitate workshops to establish business and product goals, frame problems, prioritize needs, and brainstorm solutions, among other outcomes.
• Connect regularly with product managers and product owners to to support new feature development and product strategy. Leverage human-centered design processes at the portfolio level to find value across various related project and product teams.
• Work closely with change management teammates to highlight user pain points and potential areas of resistance in order to understand business risks and foster better product adoption.
• Ensure UX designers understand the problem space, current state, and needs, and consult with them in creating and testing potential solutions.
• Lead research efforts to better understand people and their environments.
• Analyze and synthesize research into actionable insights and recommendations.
• Leverage user stories, storyboards, personas and journey maps and other artifacts to make your ideas clearly understood.

Required Skills

• 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.
• Embraces the unknown with a bias towards action in ambiguous environments.
• Work closely and iteratively with both users/customers and internal, interdisciplinary teams including Product Designers, Product Owners, Agilist and Technologists.
• Leverage needs of users in ways that produce measurable value and understand ways technology and scope can impact the final results.
• Able to balance practical realities of product work with the crucial nature of 'The Art of the Possible.'