Strategist - Workplace

Your Role

You are skilled and highly proficient in user-centred strategy and insight-driven design, an empathetic champion of the user, with an insatiable curiosity for their motivations and needs, fluent in the end-to-end customer journey.

You’re someone who can synthesize and translate abstract and complex concepts and content into simple, innovative solutions that frame clear opportunities to build strong product and service experiences. A seasoned practitioner who can zoom in and out and thrives at the intersection of data, technology, place, service and creativity.

You have an ability to look at a situation, deconstruct it, and devise a way to make it better and you are a restless futurist, inspired by brand and business innovation as well as emerging technologies, while remaining keenly focused on solving the needs of today’s brands.

An analytical and technically minded problem solver with a brain for logic, data, and patterns, you know how to call on both the analytical and creative sides of your brain to help find that perfect balance that changes the way humans experience the digital and physical world.

You will create strategies and deliverables that provide perspective, inspire innovation, and drive decisions and outcomes and are able to uncover, synthesize, and explain the complex in a clear, simple, and actionable way.

What You Will Do

• Work directly with clients at the outset of an assignment to define (or redefine) the right opportunity and the right problem to solve.

• Present directly to clients, building a relationship by ensuring their goals and ambitions are able to be achieved through our proposed strategies and solutions.

• Provide insights to help devise world-class strategies that contribute to thoughtful solutions by helping develop deliverables including research plans and analysis, experience briefs, customer journeys, roadmaps, workshops, and retail strategies.

• You’ll provide strategic inputs throughout the creation of the products – from vision and conception to launch and optimization.

• You’ll challenge both clients and peers to think about opportunities that solve business challenges while meeting brand and customer needs.

• You’ll work closely with a multi-disciplinary group of Strategists, Analysts, Planners, Architects, and Designers to develop engaging solutions for clients, demonstrating and inspiring the client and team by showing your knowledge and your craft.

Your Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in creating human-cantered design, service design, and/or experience strategies, preferably for clients in the lifestyle sector (retail, hospitality, entertainment, etc).

• Have worked in a progressive, creatively-driven environment that embraces strategy as part of the core design process.

• Proven track record creating strategies, including customer journeys, archetypes, experience briefs, strategic POVs and workshops that manifest into solutions that cut across the digital and physical worlds.

• Experience working in dynamic conditions and on multiple workstreams that require fast iterations and pivoting between collaborative and individual work 

• Experience in executing research initiatives to gather additional content focused requirements.

• Experience in designing and supporting engaging workshops with internal teams, clients, and other stakeholders 

• Ability to develop compelling communications that help clients to visualize and understand the benefits and implications of strategies and recommendations  

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills while working with teams, clients, and other partners 

• Self-motivated and entrepreneurial  

• Comfortable with the ambiguity of working in and defining unknown spaces  

• Experience with presentations and proposal development

• The ability to respond proactively and thoughtfully to design critique and feedback from clients and colleagues 

• The ability to infuse empathy and behavioral analysis into your work 

• Familiarity with design research methodologies and processes 

Technical Requirements

• Proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign required), and Microsoft Office (PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Outlook), and other visual communication tools

• Fluency with digital collaboration tools such as Miro, Mural, Microsoft Teams etc.

• Familiarity with website development software/language, Readymag, Square Space and other technologies is a plus

• Familiarity with rapid prototyping tools such as Invision, Sketch, and AdobeXD a plus

Life at Gensler

As a people-first organization, we are as committed to enjoying life as we are to delivering best-in-class design. From internal design competitions to research grants to “Well-being Week,” our offices reflect our people’s diverse interests.

We encourage every person at Gensler to lead a healthy and balanced life. Our comprehensive benefits include medical, dental, vision, disability and wellness programs. We also offer profit sharing and twice annual bonus opportunities.

As part of the firm’s commitment to licensure and professional development, Gensler offers reimbursement for certain professional licenses and associated renewals and exam fees. In addition, we reimburse tuition for certain eligible programs or classes. We view our professional development programs as strategic investments in our future.