Senior Design Strategist

A Career at HARMAN

As a technology leader that is rapidly on the move, HARMAN is filled with people who are focused on making life better. Innovation, inclusivity and teamwork are a part of our DNA. When you add that to the challenges we take on and solve together, you’ll discover that at HARMAN you can grow, make a difference and be proud of the work you do every day.

About the role

Huemen Design is seeking a talented individual to develop and lead Design Strategy under a unified Research offering to deliver the Huemen value proposition. This role will contribute to the practice of Design strategy with rigorous qualitative, quantitative, and/or design research methods across a variety of industries and product categories across HARMAN as well as their clients. We practice a user-centered, collaborative, and iterative design process with a focus on simplicity, trust, seamlessness and humanization. This role will report to the Director, Design Research.

Your Team

We are a team of passionate researchers, strategists, and business analysts that have a strong desire to provide value with empowering data. Our goal is to help clients find the right problems to solve, identify where their business provides the most value, and understand their users so they can become the industry benchmark. We are comfortable with ambiguity, strive to find non-obvious insights, love to learn from others, and enjoy taking on new challenges.

What You Will Do
- As the Senior Design Strategist, you will be responsible for delivering user experience strategy initiatives to create user journeys in a storytelling format to demonstrate how solutions solve problems.
- Provide Design Strategy to deliver impact across HARMAN to advocate a user-centric, research-led, strategic design approach.
- Lead client engagements that include a Design Strategy focus and make recommendations based on project scopes and identified opportunities for client business growth.
- Collaborate with technology, product, business, and design stakeholders to uncover customer and business needs and translating them into intuitive and engaging experiences.
- Evaluate existing and new experiences, identifying opportunities and solutions for improvement, experimentation, and innovation.
- Plan and execute research with a variety of qualitative, quantitative and mixed research methods including literature reviews, surveys, generative and evaluative user testing, heuristic evaluations, and others.
- Analyze research to find innovative solutions to complex and technical design issues.
- Disseminate intricate research data. Provide analysis of information to HARMAN and project leaders including senior level executives. Present research findings and recommendations in a clear and compelling manner, translating technical information in a way the client can understand.
- Communicate compelling stories to make research findings relevant, actionable, and impactful by balancing user, business and technology goals and presenting in a variety of formats - e.g., presentations, videos, posters.
- Lead stakeholder workshops and research, defining user personas, performing competitive analysis, and developing future state strategy roadmaps.
- Lead translation of complex ideas into understandable concepts that evolve and enhance the product and service experiences.
- Understand and incorporate complex business, strategic, and technical requirements into engagement outcomes.
- Serve as thought leader for user experience strategy via speaking engagements and academic publications.

What You Need
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Marketing & Communications, Service Design, Strategic Design, Innovation Strategy, Business Administration, or a related field
- 7+ years of experience creating user experience strategy
- Exemplary verbal and written communication skills
- Proficiency in creating segments, personas, design principles, customer needs based experience maps, ecosystem maps, user journeys, and service blueprints
- Demonstrated ability to communicate clearly and concisely to peers and executive leadership in a customer-client setting
- Proven track record of managing projects
- Knowledgeable about product and digital design
- Proven project management skills
- Strong attention to detail and creative problem-solver
- Self-motivated: Work resourcefully in a fast-paced environment with moderate guidance, effectively using research methods and resources

What is Nice to Have
- Demonstrated customer/client relationship experience for a creative design agency
- Diverse strategic skill set spanning industry categories, experience in both B2B and B2C a plus
- Experience with feature integration planning based on holistic system UX design, creating UX storyline to highlight product use cases, and creating user stories that drive requirements and ways to measure resulting UX
- Passionate about understanding people, curious about the relationship between technology and society

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