Senior Lead Service Designer
Arlington, VA

Job Description

Senior Lead Designer

(Focus & Full-Service Brands)

Long-term, 1 year+

Location: McLean, VA

Immediate new job opening for a Senior Lead Designer to join our team and work on-site at our client's global HQ's based in McLean, VA. This is a long-term, 1 year+ consulting engagement. This will be on a new team focused on developing innovative experiences and services across Focus Service Brands. This Sr. Lead Designer will be a key member of the team and will work closely with a lean, cross-functional team that focuses on evolving some existing products as well as helping to build creative solutions for new concepts and services, both digital and non-digital, that satisfy customer needs, opportunities, or pain points in experience. The Senior Lead Designer will need to be able to move from the big-picture 40,000-foot concepts to the ground-level implementation details without missing a beat.

As this is a newly created role, this individual will need to employ the same test-and-learn mentality to the team's process and approach that they will apply to the products and services that the team creates.

Key Responsibilities:

The Senior Lead Designer: Customer Experience & Innovation, Focus Service Brands will lead the design thinking activities to understand user needs, participate in problem definition, create high and low fidelity prototypes, craft the narrative to share their group's work with the broader organization. An especially important responsibility is creating testable MVPs. Design and user research exercises will be very frequent activities. When required, development of content strategy and creating information architecture artifacts will also be activities this person will need to handle. If qualified, he or she may even pick up some light UI development. The person in this role needs to be comfortable with learning new skills as the team explores new ideas.

This position requires someone who is comfortable working on loosely defined problems, leading groups in generative creative activities, all in a fast-learned atmosphere. At times, this team will deliver an idea to a production environment, other times they will be asked to deliver low-fidelity ideas to other teams for execution.

Other Responsibilities:

o Cultivate curiosity.

o Experiment early and often.

o Inspire innovative approaches to design.

o Advocate for customers and usable product design.

o Identify pain points and opportunities in our customers' experience with us and understand what customers really need and want.

o Lead user-centered design exercises (e.g. brainstorming activities and design sprints) .

o Be the hands-on design and creative expert for the product team.

o Shape concepts through prototyping, user testing and pilot delivery. Leverage insights about people and behavior - verbally and visually - in a way that generates empathy, emotion, and engagement.

o Understand the technology available on various platforms and how we can harness it in simple but innovative ways.

o Create low fidelity, customer-centric design concepts influenced by customer feedback, personas, customer segments and usability findings.

o Quickly iterate on multiple interactive design solutions.

o Articulate design rationale to stakeholders, peers, and executives. Elevate design standards for scaled experiences, both digital and non-digital.

o Collaborate with our research team to identify qualitative and quantitative research practices for this team.

o Identify and communicate KPI?s for measuring creative success.

o Stay current on emerging technologies and trends.

o Incorporate the best new creative and technical trends into product designs.

o Work with little oversight and be responsible for delivering work of exceptional quality.

Desired Attributes:

o Extremely comfortable with ambiguity.

o Flexibility while working in a fast-paced, ambiguous, newly established environment.

o Excellent communication, presentation, storytelling, interpersonal and analytical skills.

o Works effectively with or within large, matrixed organizations.

o Experience partnering closely with engineering teams in an agile environment.

o Experience with converting complex problems into actionable strategies.

o A strong business sense and the ability to clearly articulate the value of creative output to stakeholders and partners.

o Ability to use data to inform and drive key decisions.

o Strong understanding of current and emerging technologies.

o Experience leading design sprint exercises.

o Willingness to travel (10% - 15%)

Required Experience

o BA/BS Bachelor's Degree, or equivalent professional experience.

o 10 years' experience as a user experience architect, product designer, service designer, creative lead, creative director, creative technologist, or similar role.

o Possess a strong design portfolio, ideally a mix of digital and physical.

o Experience with common design tools such as Sketch, Adobe Creative Suite, InVision, etc.

o Strong familiarity with interactive design and development standards.

Preferred Qualifications

o MS/MA/Master's Degree.

o 11 or more years' experience.

o Global work or study experience.

o Experience supporting products and services from multiple brands and used by highly diverse customer segments.