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
Skills Required
- 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
- 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
- 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 strategic front-end ambiguity and tactical evaluative research
What We Do
When clients come to us for product design and development, they get a full range of technical expertise and laboratory resources, but they also get a team that’s relentless when it comes to solving problems and creating designs that are the ideal combination of function and form. What does that mean? We build tools that save lives. For surgeons, it means they have tools that not only address but anticipate their needs, which helps improve their patients’ outcomes. We create products that save money and ensure safety. For people juggling family, work, and other demands, it means they have products that provide real help in managing their everyday lives. And for businesses, it means their bottom line is supported with durable tools that improve efficiency and protect their teams. From concept to production plan, or at any phase in between, we are a partner that can extend your product development know-how or provide additional mindpower to free up in-house teams.
