At Smashing Ideas, a Luxoft company, our focus is simple: create products that improve people’s lives in a meaningful way. Our rich legacy in creating digital experiences and products that bring joy, along with our background in Motivational UX™, has allowed us to build a consulting business that helps companies bring new digital products and services to market that transform their businesses and cultures. We believe that diverse teams lead to better outcomes, and strive to build a healthy and inclusive culture that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills.

Our clients, who are partners and extensions of our teams, are change agents themselves. Some are in the early stages of digital transformation, while others have established practices. Regardless of the stage, we serve as their catalyst for innovation.

As a Senior Strategist at Smashing Ideas, you are a critical component of a cross-functional team responsible for guiding the strategic, creative, technical, and business decisions that will increase customer engagement and achieve client objectives. The Senior Strategist leads with both the left- and right-side of their brain. They unearth and expose the core insight – the human truth that becomes our north star – and keeps the vision alive and focused through user research, data, and a strong eye on the market and competition.

This position would be a great fit for someone who knows how to work with diverse groups of stakeholders, and has experience, formally or informally, informing and inspiring clients or colleagues to make decisions and get to tangible outcomes.

Job Responsibilities

A Senior Strategist is responsible for driving 3 areas of strategic thinking and experience planning:

1. Problem Definition & Strategic Approach

Collaborate with clients to understand and communicate in-depth knowledge of a business environment, including:

– General business processes

– Target audiences/customer attributes

– Organizational “pain”

– Strategy and competitive positioning

– Organizational readiness for implementing connected, engaging solutions

Work with clients to define and prioritize their business challenges, goals and opportunities. Outline strategic approach for team to achieve objectives.

Define critical metrics and how they will be measured. Keep team focused on these critical metrics

Provide team and client with additional marketplace, vertical and competitive insights.

Drive formulation of insights-based hypotheses for ways to approach a given project

2. Holistic Market and User Insights

Collaborate with client to identify, understand and communicate existing research

Lead gap analysis to understand and recommend additional research (if needed)

Recommend and estimate additional research, workshops, or other “add-on” activities for clients to improve product experience

Rapidly conduct secondary research, including industry research, market scan, and competitive research

Design and conduct primary user research, including interviews, concept testing, and surveys

Analyze and synthesize findings from multiple inputs and produce actionable insights

With UX architect, feed customer behavior insights and design insights into the team

Identify the driving needs and motivations of target audiences to create strong value propositions

3. Experience Strategy

Help clients focus on the why and align on a long-term vision that drives shared value and trust, including:

Plan and co-facilitate envisioning workshops to help organizations define and align on their vision against tangible outcomes

With cross-functional team, define an actionable roadmap to realize the vision

Create compelling documents that summarize the vision and plan, and inspire executive buy-in

In partnership with Design, deliver insight-based experience map for target personas against business objectives

Expertly analyze data and make recommendations for product improvements/refinements and identify opportunities to create new value for customers

Requirements:

Proven experience identifying a core insight that delivered a big idea

Experience in a lead, client-facing role for a large customer

Ability to present confidently and persuasively to large and small groups of executive-level clients

Ability to write compelling narratives demonstrating strong thought leadership

Ability to deal with ambiguity and tackle complex business challenges

Experience leading multiple forms of customer research – survey, contextual, ethnographic, analytics, as examples

Experience crafting insight-based creative briefs driven by an empathetic understanding of user and market needs

Experience synthesizing secondary data sources to create a cohesive narrative

Demonstrated ability to actively listen, facilitate collaboration, and align teams with diverse perspectives

Passionate about consuming applicable business, consumer, and cultural information

Collaborative work style, with a bias toward action

Willingness to identify and challenge biases

A sense of humor

Nice to have Skills:

Content strategy

Business design

Communication strategy

Data & analytics

* We are committed to hiring and cultivating a diverse team and inclusive environment. Smashing Ideas is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender presentation, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

** This is an onsite position in our beautiful Seattle, WA office. This is not a Telecommute/Remote Work position