About the Role
We are seeking a Design Research & Experience Strategist to lead and grow our research practice while expanding the role of research across product, service, brand, consumer, medical, and digital experience opportunities.
The ideal candidate is a self-starter who can identify opportunities, build structure where ambiguity exists, and translate user understanding into actionable strategies that inform design, innovation, and business decisions.
What You'll Do
Research Leadership
- Lead design research initiatives including front-end discovery, contextual inquiry, ethnography, stakeholder interviews, concept evaluation, journey mapping, and opportunity framing.
- Develop research plans tailored to business questions, project phases, user populations, and client objectives.
- Establish and maintain research standards, templates, and best practices to ensure quality and consistency.
- Mentor researchers and cross-functional team members in research planning, fieldwork, synthesis, and insight communication.
Experience Strategy
- Translate research findings into strategic frameworks, experience principles, service concepts, product direction, and innovation roadmaps.
- Facilitate workshops that align stakeholders, define priorities, and move teams toward actionable outcomes.
- Identify opportunities to expand research into broader strategy engagements including service design, brand experience, and front-end innovation.
Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration
- Build flexible project teams integrating Design Research, Industrial Design, Human Factors, UX/UI, Graphic Design, and Engineering.
- Train and guide team members to support research activities such as observation, synthesis, journey mapping, and insight translation.
- Foster a collaborative research culture that values rigor without creating silos.
Practice Growth & Business Development
- Partner with leadership to shape research and strategy offerings that respond to client needs and market opportunities.
- Support proposal development, project scoping, and client presentations.
- Help define and package offerings around design research, experience strategy, service design, and innovation strategy.
Required Qualifications
- 7+ years of experience in design research, experience strategy, service design, innovation strategy, or related fields.
- Strong knowledge of qualitative research methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, interviews, journey mapping, and concept evaluation.
- Demonstrated ability to translate research insights into actionable strategies, frameworks, and design principles.
- Experience managing, mentoring, or guiding researchers and cross-functional teams.
- Strong facilitation skills including client workshops and stakeholder alignment sessions.
- Excellent communication, storytelling, and presentation skills.
- Background in consulting, agency, product development, healthcare, consumer product, or innovation environments.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in medical device, healthcare, consumer product, digital product, or brand strategy.
- Familiarity with human factors, usability engineering, or regulated product development.
- Experience partnering with Industrial Design, Human Factors, UX/UI, Graphic Design, and Engineering teams.
- Ability to support business development through proposals, scoping, and client conversations.
- Experience building or evolving a design research practice.
- Comfort working across both strategic front-end ambiguity and tactical evaluative research.
What We're Looking For
The ideal candidate is a principal design research leader who has grown into experience strategy. You are comfortable working in ambiguity, confident leading clients and teams, and energized by building something larger than a single discipline. You balance research rigor with business pragmatism - knowing when deep research is required, when a lean approach is appropriate, and how to bring the right disciplines into the process.
- Self-starter with strong ownership and initiative
- Strategic thinker who can connect user insight to business value
- Collaborative leader who can integrate multiple disciplines
- Clear communicator and compelling storyteller
- Low ego, high standards