Experience Strategy Director

Who we are looking for:

Wunderman Thompson, Midwest is seeking an Experience Strategy Director to be responsible for leading the experience strategy and design for a portfolio of clients. You are a seasoned, highly-proficient leader and expert in user-centeredstrategy and UX designprinciples. You’re someone who can synthesize and translate abstract and complex concepts into simple solutions that frame clear opportunities to build strong product and service experiences. Where our clients see insurmountable challenges, you relish in the opportunity to show them the path to success.

You’re a seasoned strategy practitioner who can zoom in and out and thrives at the intersection of data, technology and creativity. You enjoy leading multifaceted teams and getting your mind and hands in the details. You’re an empathetic champion of the customer, with an insatiable curiosity for their motivations and actions. You’re multi-lingual, with the ability to collaborate with senior-level clients, agency leadership, account teams, digital project managers, brand strategists, creative directors, developers and UX practitioners to envision and iterate product design concepts, and deliver world-class experience design solutions. You have an ability to look at a situation, deconstruct it, and devise a way to make it better. You’re a restless futurist and thought-leader inspired by brand and business innovation and emerging technologies, while remaining keenly focused on the practical needs of today’s brands.

To be considered for this role, you must submit an online portfolio or PDF of your work.

What you’ll do:

• Formulate Experience Strategy | Lead the analysis needed to devise world-class customer experience strategies, including digital product and service design audits, content audits, competitive analysis, market opportunity trends, qualitative research plans, and research analysis. You’ll provide strategic rigor during the entire life cycle of a digital product or service experience – from vision and conception to launch and optimization.
• Lead Teams | Provide leadership, mentorship and support for XS/XD staff. Execute and guide teams to create outstanding and cohesive customer experiences across the client portfolio. Apply user-centered strategy methods to uncover and synthesize user insights and needs with brand and business goals translated into clear direction that guides effective UX design methods.
• Partner with Clients | You’ll serve as a trusted strategic advisor to all levels of clients, leading them and earning their trust by demonstrating credibility in your craft, an unbiased perspective and unique take on their business challenges, a passion for their brand and their customer, and an unwavering focus on their success.

Who you are:

• Systematic Thinker | You’re an analytical and technically-minded problem solver. You’re also design-oriented with an obsession for data, patterns, and how disparate parts of a system work together. You’re relentless about improving the way humans navigate the digital and physical world.
• Inspiring Leader and Doer | You know how to influence and persuade teams and create artifacts and deliverables that drive decisions and outcomes. And, while you are adept at providing inspiring direction to your peers and teams, you also like to dig in and be hands-on to get things done.
• Collaborator | You thrive working at the center of small groups that include Brand Strategists, Experience Designers, Project Managers and Technologists, serving as a spark that helps the team conceptualize, design, deliver and optimize multi-platform solutions for our clients.

What you’ll need:

• 10+ years of experience in a digital or integrated agency or consultancy with 5+ years of client-facing experience. 
• Experience working in a progressive, creatively-driven agency environment that has embraced digitally-led thinking and XS/XD principles as part of the core creative process. 
• Proven track record leading Experience Strategy for complex website builds involving redesign, site consolidations, IA/Content Strategy, platform builds and brand integration. 
• Experience working across multiple parallel workstreams with a familiarity and comfort working within an agile environment. 
• Experience in guiding and executing research initiatives, ideally both quant and qual. 
• A diverse portfolio of work that demonstrates your approach to Experience Strategy and how it was applied to influence the creation of user-centered product and service experiences that drove business results for your clients.