At AKQA, we believe in the imaginative application of art and science to create beautiful ideas, products and services. With an entrepreneurial and collaborative approach, we design adaptive digital services and applications that capture the imagination, delivering impressive returns for our clients.

Strategists at AKQA are curious thinkers who investigate, understand, simplify and inspire to create a better future. They see beyond the immediate problem or question at hand, digging deeper to find patterns and insights in the chaos, and are comfortable with the nebulous. In this role, the Strategy Director will be responsible for strategic leadership across 1-2 of our core accounts, with a focus on experience design across our clients’ digital product and service portfolios. The Strategy Director serves as "trusted counsel" to clients by spotting opportunities and shaping their future, internal teams by elevating insights and influencing work, and strategy colleagues through mentorship and career management.

Day to day, this could look like partnering with cross-disciplinary leads to review new briefs and craft project approaches, leading stakeholder interviews or discovery sessions, creating the framing for a service blueprint or identifying meaningful moments within a customer journey. Across all activities, they will work closely with the full team to formulate and deliver smart, tailored, evidence-based and action-oriented perspectives and frameworks that can serve our clients’ needs.

This role, the project teams and our client partners are primarily based in Atlanta, GA. We will expect this role to work east coast hours and be willing to join occasional in-person client and team meetings, as benefits the work and the relationships.

ROLE REQUIREMENTS

• Develop a deep understanding of our clients’ business, the verticals in which they operate and their competitive landscapes.
• Bring a human-centered perspective to our clients’ business, brand, experience, and product challenges.
• Partner with multi-disciplinary account leads to intake client assignments, develop tailored approaches for the discovery and opportunity definition of workstreams.
• Proactively identify and surface new opportunities for our clients and original thinking to our teams.
• Deeply understand, and be comfortable putting into practice, a range of strategic activities across brand, consumer experience and product design: from designing and leading research efforts, to creating inspirational briefs or drafting compelling points of views, to planning workshops and analyzing customer journeys to defining a go-to-market approach for a new touchpoint.
• Ensure the strategic quality and integrity of work across 1-2 accounts, mentoring junior strategists and other team members through the work.
• Review ideas for their distinctiveness, relevance and effectiveness, and work collaboratively to refine and improve the ideas as a team.
• Serve as a leader within the strategy department, taking on operational responsibilities around resourcing and staffing as well as championing the career of strategists who report directly to you.

QUALITIES AND CHARACTERISTICS

• You are energized by finding the through line or connective tissue among the seemingly unrelated, and you obsess over simplifying the complex.
• You have exceptionally strong communication and interpersonal skills; you find relationship-building and storytelling to be core responsibilities of a strong strategist.
• You are entrepreneurial: excited try new things, dive in and figure challenges of all shapes and sizes out, and you see the opportunity where others may not.
• You have demonstrated leadership ability, both within workstreams and as a career manager for other strategists.

AKQA is an Equal Opportunities Employer, we believe that diversity is vital to AKQA’s ability to provide our clients with the best recommendations and are committed to fostering a varied and inclusive work environment. Your race, color, ancestry, religion, gender, gender identity, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability or veteran status have no bearing on our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.

#LI-REMOTE