Strategic Experience Design Director, Amsterdam/Malmö

WHY WE WILL LOVE YOU
Are you passionate about human-centred design and a committed people leader and capability builder?
It is a great time to be in Digital Experience Design at IKEA!
Our team is made up of passionate experts in all areas and levels of Digital Experience Design and we are building the entire Digital Experience Design organization from scratch.
Within Strategic Experience Design and Research, we are building the Digital Experience Strategy Centre of Expertise and leading strategic experience design initiatives, data experience design initiatives including IKEA’s data promise, experience design and UX research, and emerging-technology design initiatives. We are looking for passionate coworkers to help drive IKEA into the future!
REQUIREMENTS –
We believe you are a passionate people person with demonstrated experience leading and coaching human-centred- design teams.
We think that you, as well as us, are positively obsessed about the future and believe that human-centred-design is a key enabler for innovation. You use a range of methods to surface current and future user needs and market insights, to explore, define and bring to life future customer experiences
To succeed in the role you will have experience in many of the following:
Experience in leading, managing, coaching, developing designers, promoting individual growth and mentorship. Previous people management experience is a must. Experience in leading and managing team members in different locations ispreferred.
Strong communication skills and experience building and defining relationships and ways of working and maintaining collaboration with many teams across the business
Growing design maturity and understanding of the value of human-centred design across an organization and empowering design work in strategic initiatives.
You have a strong and compelling leadership portfolio communicating your leadership beliefs, capabilities, notable career achievements, case studies of your leadership skills, projects your teams have delivered, and more

YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES
You will be leading a multi-disciplinary team of Strategic Experience Designers and Design Researchers with varying levels of experience and over multiple locations.
You will manage strategic experience design initiatives through working with primary and secondary research and driving contextual design, value proposition creation, service design, user and customer journeys, design workshops, sprints, prototyping, and more. Delivering engaging and tangible future customer and co-worker experience visions across current and future touchpoints.
Together with the other Strategic Experience Design and Research directors and principals you will be part of the Strategic Experience Design leadership team, driving the Centre of Expertise. Establishing strategic experience design in the wider IKEA organisation and driving experience design maturity, through establishing best practices, methods and tools that can be used across the organisation to drive quality of process and deliverables.
Throughout your (project) work, you naturally and continuously define Experience Design best practices by exploring new ways and benchmarking against industry standards, to validate and improve deliverables.
TOGETHER AS A TEAM
We are guided in our work by five key principles:
Design puts people first
Design brings confidence to decisions
Design is a catalyst for growth
Design brings ideas to life
Design empowers the many people

We are a new and growing team of strategic experience designers, data experience designers, design researchers and emerging technology specialists based in Malmö and Amsterdam and we are at the beginning of our journey. The nature of our work means that there is no standardised way of working but rather an approach adapted for different purposes, utilising what is already in place but building new when it is not.
We are driving human-centred-design into all areas of the organization to put the customer and co-worker at the centre of everything we do, constantly listening and learning from them, iterating, validating and improving as we go.
We value spending time to really understand how we can improve the lives of our customers, define the challenge or opportunity clearly, to explore broadly and then ensure we keep going back to them through a build test learn approach.
Where our Digital Transformation is allowing us to create new ways we meet and interact with our customers and co-workers, the Digital Experience Design team is responsible for shaping what the future actually looks like. We have a clear vision: to create everyday digital experiences for the many people through our human-centric methodologies, that enable creativity, great design and innovation.
QUESTIONS AND SUPPORT? LET'S CONNECT!
The role is based in Malmö or Amsterdam and you will report to the global Head of Strategic Experience Design & Research
If you have any questions about the recruitment process, please reach out to tech recruiter at james.goodwin@ingka.com During the summer we screen candidates continuously and therefore the ad might close earlier if we find the right candidate, please apply as soon as possible!
PLEASE NOTE
Due to GDPR we cant review any applications coming to us in other ways than trough our recruitment program.
Our primary concern since the outbreak of corona virus has been the health and safety of our co-workers and candidates. Because of this, we have adapted our recruiting processes to be fully digital.