Sr. Design Strategist, Futures Design

Futures Design is the advanced concept design and incubation team within Amazon’s Device and Services Design Group (DDG). We’re responsible for exploring and defining think (very) big opportunities globally — so that we can better understand how new products and services might enrich the lives of our customers. We work on devices and services that are not yet on our roadmap, with the runway to invent and design category-defining transformational customer experiences. We ground ourselves in customer insights to envision foreseen futures through powerful prototyping and storytelling. It’s our job to create robust visions that transform into new markets, technologies and offerings.

About this role

We are looking for a charismatic design leader who has a deep expertise in design thinking and experience defining net new opportunities based on customer insights, emergent tech and business requirements. Working directly with senior leaders, you’ll be responsible for identifying, defining and planning opportunities that have demonstrable and meaningful impact on customers’ lives. As part of opportunity finding, you can navigate relationship building with partner teams across the business and across timezones. You’ll craft value propositions that present a clear and compelling narrative to leadership, exciting them to invest. You’ll be responsible for planning large-scale design efforts including defining outcomes, deliverables, schedules, resourcing, budget, and stakeholder communication. You’re comfortable making high judgment calls throughout the process (including when to escalate risk to leadership, when to pivot from the plan, etc.) and are often right in those decisions. You’ll be joining a collaborative team of multi-disciplinary designers with the view that no individual can know enough by themselves to crack tough innovation challenges and the best teams involve many disciplines in their design process.

About you

You have the drive to solve big questions that have no obvious answers today. You’re passionate about being at the forefront of digital experiences, interested in artificial intelligence, and skilled in innovation tools/methods. Working with design and product leadership, you relish collaboration on defining our product vision (through design artefacts) to excite and inspire our partners and team to continually innovate and deliver value. You’re an exceptional designer, using your full range of design skills to deliver simple, beautifully-crafted experiences that set a high bar for design excellence. You’re comfortable working with a multi-disciplinary team from early concept generation (brainstorms and basic sketches) through to polished solutions (high fidelity outputs across mediums). You excel at crafting new product and service concept development strategies by immersing yourself in customer needs, market landscape and business capabilities. Through this, you’re able to explore scenarios and elevate seeds of ideas into opportunities that excites our team and leaders. Your ability to think about high level product strategy and translate it into design principles and frameworks, matures the team’s ability to turn ambiguity into tangible experiences that customers will love.

Key job responsibilities
- Identify opportunities based on customer insights, business strategy and emergent cultural/tech trends.
- Present compelling narratives to design leadership and key stakeholders to develop and obtain buy in.
- Adept at all phases of the innovation design lifecycle (e.g., discovery, ideation, prioritisation, refinement and building a narrative to share broadly and cater to various audiences).
- Work with ambiguity and generate divergent concepts. You can explore broad themes but also find the compelling nuggets to go deeper.
- Bring concepts to life through various mediums (e.g., prototypes, motion, video, high-fidelity visuals and physical form factors). We aren’t prescriptive about how you visualise ideas.
- Create, track, and communicate project information with teams and stakeholders.
- Plan large-scale design efforts including defining outcomes, deliverables, schedules, resourcing and budget,
- Digest a lot of information, make sense of it and turn it into meaningful experiences for our customers and business.
- Develop and maintain a deep understanding of industry trends, customer needs and competitive landscape to inform design strategy
- Work across design and Amazon to create strong relationships with senior leadership and stakeholders

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

- Have an available online portfolio
- Experience working on greenfield projects or identifying net new product ideas and solutions.
- Experience creating go-to-market artefacts, including defining audience, positioning, value proposition and success metrics.
- Experience in delivering design solutions for projects of large scope and complexity.
- Experience designing for interactive digital platforms.
- Professional experience as a UX Designer, Product Designer or Design Strategist role.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- Experience creating new and inspiring North Star concepts that informs the vision of Futures Design
- Have your finger on the pulse of emergent design trends
- Ability to navigate ambiguity to drive the design process
- Ability to multitask in a fast-paced environment
- Experience collaborating with UX, Product, and technical partners
- Excellent communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills