Senior UX Strategist

Compensation Range:

Annual Salary: $78,496.00 - $105,974.00

Position Summary

The Senior UX Strategist is responsible for shaping and optimizing end-to-end customer experiences across the prospective student journey through research, journey strategy, customer discovery, service design, and innovation. This role leads user research, journey mapping, design thinking, and requirements gathering to uncover customer needs, identify experience opportunities, and translate insights into actionable strategies and scalable solutions.

Working cross-functionally with Product, Design, Analytics, Marketing, and Technology teams. The Senior UX Strategist drives alignment, influences decision-making, and helps create customer-centered digital experiences that improve engagement, conversion, and overall user outcomes.

Essential Functions:

Experience Strategy & Journey Mapping

• Lead end-to-end prospective student journey mapping, service blueprinting, and experience strategy initiatives across National University's digital ecosystem.
• Define current-state and future-state prospective student journeys, identifying friction points, unmet needs, moments that matter, and opportunities to improve engagement, inquiry, application progression, and enrollment outcomes.
• Translate prospective student insights, institutional priorities, and business objectives into experience strategies, journey roadmaps, and prioritized recommendations that influence digital product and UX roadmaps.
• Develop experience frameworks, journey principles, and future-state vision artifacts that guide customer-centered digital experiences across the prospective student lifecycle.
• Partner with Marketing, Enrollment, Product, and Digital teams to align prospective student journey priorities with institutional goals and long-term digital strategy.

User Research & Discovery

• Develop and own the UX research strategy and roadmap supporting prospective student experience initiatives.
• Lead and execute qualitative and quantitative research, including stakeholder interviews, prospective student interviews, usability testing, surveys, concept validation, diary studies, and behavioral research.
• Synthesize customer insights, behavioral analytics, market research, competitive analysis, and voice-of-the-customer findings into strategic recommendations that shape experience strategy and digital priorities.
• Establish and mature UX research standards, repositories, tools, governance, and knowledge-sharing practices that strengthen organizational understanding of prospective student behaviors and needs.
• Manage research vendors, participant recruitment, research operations, budgets, and external partnerships to ensure high-quality research execution.
• Partner with the Digital Analytics team to combine qualitative and quantitative insights into a comprehensive understanding of prospective student behaviors, motivations, and decision-making.

Innovation, Ideation & Experience Planning

• Lead design thinking workshops, customer journey workshops, ideation sessions, and cross-functional innovation initiatives focused on improving the prospective student experience.
• Facilitate collaborative discovery sessions with Product, Marketing, Engineering, Analytics, Enrollment, and Content teams to identify customer needs, define opportunities, and align on future-state experiences.
• Gather, synthesize, and prioritize business, customer, and technical requirements, translating findings into strategic experience recommendations, opportunity assessments, and implementation-ready requirements.
• Develop future-state journey concepts, service blueprints, experience frameworks, and innovation proposals that improve prospective student engagement and enrollment outcomes.
• Research emerging trends in customer experience, AI, higher education, and digital innovation to identify new opportunities that strengthen National University's prospective student experience.
• Influence digital product and experience roadmaps by advocating for prospective student needs, journey improvements, and evidence-based experience decisions.

Supervisory Responsibilities:

• Individual contributor role that provides leadership through influence and expertise; scope may evolve over time based on organizational needs.

Requirements:

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in marketing, Business, Analytics, Statistics, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related field. Master’s degree or M.B.A. preferred.
• 6 -8 years of experience in UX Strategy, UX Research, Service Design