Principal Design Strategist

A Career at HARMAN

As a technology leader that is rapidly on the move, HARMAN is filled with people who are focused on making life better. Innovation, inclusivity and teamwork are a part of our DNA. When you add that to the challenges we take on and solve together, you’ll discover that at HARMAN you can grow, make a difference and be proud of the work you do every day.

About the Role

Huemen Design is seeking a talented individual to elevate the practice of Design Strategy under a unified Research offering to deliver the Huemen value proposition.  This role will contribute to the practice of Design strategy with rigorous qualitative, quantitative, and/or design research methods across a variety of industries and product categories across HARMAN as well as their clients. We practice a user-centered, collaborative, and iterative design process with a focus on simplicity, trust, seamlessness, and humanization.  This role will report to the Director of Design Research and will mentor a team of 2-4 individual contributor design researchers, nurturing their career growth and research expertise.

Your Team

We are a team of passionate researchers, strategists, and business analysts who have a strong desire to provide value with empowering data.  Our goal is to help clients find the right problems to solve, identify where their business provides the most value, and understand their users so they can become the industry benchmark.  We are comfortable with ambiguity, strive to find non-obvious insights, love to learn from others and enjoy taking on new challenges.   

What You Will Do

• Deliver user experience strategy initiatives to create user journeys in a storytelling format to demonstrate how solutions solve problems.

• Provide Design Strategy to deliver impact across HARMAN to advocate a user-centric, research-led, strategic design approach.

• Lead client engagements that include a Design Strategy focus and make recommendations based on project scopes and identified opportunities for client business growth.

• Lead collaboration with technology, product, business, and design stakeholders to uncover customer and business needs and translate them into intuitive and engaging experiences.

• Evaluate existing and new experiences, identifying opportunities and solutions for improvement, experimentation, and innovation.

• Plan and execute research with a variety of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed research methods including literature reviews, surveys, generative and evaluative user testing, heuristic evaluations, and others. 

• Analyze research to find innovative solutions to complex and technical design issues.

• Disseminate intricate research data. Provide analysis of information to HARMAN and project leaders including senior-level executives. Present research findings and recommendations clearly and compellingly, translating technical information in a way the client can understand. 

• Create and communicate compelling stories to make research findings relevant, actionable, and impactful by balancing user, business, and technology goals and presenting in a variety of formats - e.g., presentations, videos, posters. 

• Support research team lead in project prioritization and progress reporting

• Contribute to next-generation research group vision by identifying areas of opportunity or improvement, participating in recruiting and interviewing new team members, and mentoring other researchers on the team

• Plan and lead stakeholder workshops and research, defining user personas, performing competitive analysis, and developing future state strategy roadmaps.

• Lead the project team in the translation of complex ideas into understandable concepts that evolve and enhance the product and service experiences.

• Lead the project team in understanding and incorporating complex business, strategic, and technical requirements into engagement outcomes.

• Serve as thought leader for user experience strategy via speaking engagements and academic publications.

• Self-motivated: Work resourcefully in a fast-paced environment with moderate guidance, effectively using research methods and resources

• Brand steward: Understand brand vision and impact for all products and services

• Experience evangelist: Maintain a knowledge base of the latest experience trends and implement best practices for user-centered design 

• Technology-aware: Continuously monitor advances in technology, seeking opportunities to enhance human experiences

What You Need

• Graduate degree in marketing & communications, service design, strategic design, innovation strategy, business administration, or a related f