Experience Strategy Manager

Key responsibilities:

As an Experience Strategy Manager, you will engage, lead and collaborate in cross-disciplinary teams to conceive and produce best-in-class, consistent user experiences, new products and services. You will wear multiple hats and manage multiple projects at once

Engages with Business Stakeholders & Senior Product Owners/Delivery Leads:

• Leads BU accounts on products & stakeholder management
• Manages a team of strategist & senior strategists and is accountable for BU CX deliverables
• Collaborates alongside Senior Product Owners and Business stakeholders to define business opportunities and translate insights into consumer-facing experiences.
• Partners closely to help shape the product strategy and roadmap that will build successful products.
• Has a strategic perspective that includes consideration of the overarching customer experience, frameworks, product roadmaps, etc.
• Engages business stakeholders to understand, test and refine new ways of working with the goal of achieving desire customer experiences across the entire user journey.

Research & Synthesis

• On independent projects, is responsible for leading all aspects of design research sprint, from initial qualitative and quantitative research and testing, customer journeys, and user testing. You are responsible for synthesizing actionable insights to ensure product teams build the right features
• Has an experience with user research skill set: discovery and exploratory research, usability testing, online surveys, customer interviews, contextual inquiry, mystery shopping etc
• Designs and deliver best practice user research - i.e. identify potential solution options for a stated user need and design experiments that help elicit the most viable solution for users
• Analyses failure or pain points within services and experiences and identify root causes for that failure. Understands the existing supporting system of a service and designs targeted improvements to that system to accommodate the new service - both digital and process based
• Empowers the design team to leverage data and understand design implications and opportunities.

Partners with Product Design team

• For the product design teams, you will advise the creative direction of digital products and platforms. This will outline the intended users, their needs, and the desired experience; and the connection to the brand.
• Combines oversight with hands-on work that consists deliverables which clearly and persuasively communicate the product UX strategy, findings, and reasoning behind it. These include research plans, research findings, personas, and journey maps.
• Leads collaborative workshops and concepts sprints to inject design thinking tools and methodologies to produce tangible results in a rapid and iterative way
• Ultimately you are responsible for ensuring that our designers design through a customer lens and create a truly magical Customer Experience for our Customers, staying true to our Customer Experience Manifesto
• Partner closely with product design teams across the organization to ensure consistency in deliverables where needed

Assists Lead - Experience and Strategy Director in managing, building and scaling the team

• Collaborates with the Lead to evolve design processes, tools and systems to ensure the team is creating great, consistent work
• Assists in scaling a team of talented individual contributors and actively contributes to shape a culture that enables creativity, cross-functional collaboration, open feedback, and design excellence across the team.
• Provide critical input into developing a common design language that is unique to our product and our customers love, whilst also compliant with Majid Al Futtaim Groups Digital Expression Guidelines

Additionally, the role holder will have responsibility to:

• Contribute positively to the CX culture within Majid Al Futtaim
• Form strong relationships with your peers within the MAF Digital and broader business units                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Measure of Success – Illustrative KPIs

Experience Strategy Manager KPIs:

The estimated budget for MAF Digital department is AED30Million for the first year. A scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is the lowest and 5 is the highest, this role would have a financial KPI responsibility of 3

• Success will be measured based on impact across customer acquisition, activation rates, retention rates, referral revenues, ATV , ARPU, LTV and other similar metrics
• # Successful Research & Design Sprints held vs monthly plan
• # Design Sprint insights that lead to demonstrable feature improvements
• Identify features and strategies that would allow maximum visibility into user behavior to identify trends within the product flow and translate those insights into product features.
• Actual research programme deliverables vs. planned research programme milestones
• Creating a culture of Experience Strategy led Design
• Driving business leadership team to always think through the customer lens
• Product design alignment to CX Manifesto
• Consistency of experience across MAF digital products in compliance with DEGs
• Help Research analysts define their career paths, identify opportunities and level up to do the best work of their lives.

Financial KPIs:

• Accountable for ensuring conversion rates on profit drivers within the digital product
• Accountable for CX Design Research Budget

Other Context (if applicable):

Willing to travel to Jordan and work with our Amman office periodically

Personal Characteristics and Required Background:

Skillset (job specific technical skills and behavioral competencies needed)

• You are an experienced Experience Strategy Manager / Creative with a proven track record of developing product experiences that have succeeded in the marketplace.
• You have a deep understanding of digital product lifecycle; are comfortable working with designers, technical & business teams; and have a deep knowledge of an array of research methodologies
• Experience in customer journey mapping, measurement, process improvement and strategy
• You know how a product should look, feel and work, and understand what users need and want in the digital space and in real life.
• You have an expertise in the design thinking methodologies, well versed in rapid prototyping and iterative processes. You can demonstrate a portfolio of work with detailed examples how your research work has improved CX
• You have a deep knowledge in conducting qualitative research and a solid experience with formulating, conducting, leveraging, and reporting on qualitative user research
• You are excellent at storytelling, writing and presentation skills.
• You have the ability to clearly articulate strategy, and the thinking behind it, to stakeholders and project teams.
• A flexible thinker with good instincts and high empathy as it relates to human emotion and behavior.
• You have excellent leadership, time management and relationship management skills.
• Expertise in the general facilitating and planning of design workshops
• Strong ability to generate and communicate compelling & actionable insights, both verbally and visually
• Have experience working in an Agile /Scrum development process
• Passionate about creating value through great design and user experience
• Ability to structure ambiguous problems and define tasks needed to bring clarity
• Ability to delegate, prioritize and manage a considerable workload
• Are an advocate for best-in-class, but still pragmatic as needed based on priorities and timeline, and ensuring the team also operates in similar cadence
• You are the voice of our customers in product development, have empathy for them and are intensely customer focused. You bring the narrative of customer needs to an interdisciplinary team
• You value collaboration and are your best when part of a team.
• You are curious with a bias toward action and thrive in a fast-paced organization.

Minimum experience

7+ years in a similar role

Minimum Qualifications/education

Bachelor’s degree in relevant field or equivalent professional experience