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Associate Director, Experience Strategy

New York, New York, United States

Associate Director, Experience Strategy
Our experience team works with strategy, verbal and visual design, business, and technology leaders to define how a brand or product behaves and connects it with what they do and why they do it. Working as a key contributor and voice within interdisciplinary teams, you will structure ambiguity with the utmost clarity and translate strategic insight into practical design systems, journeys, and frameworks that guide how organizations deliver products, services, and experiences at scale.

What you will do:

  • Lead experience strategy on client engagements, from discovery through implementation;
  • Develop systems maps, user journeys, and behavioral frameworks to guide design and delivery;
  • Collaborate within intersectional teams and lead the definition and execution of digital product, service, or experience concepts to align with broader business strategy;
  • Lead cross-disciplinary analysis of existing solutions and opportunity spaces that drive user understanding amongst diverse audiences; 
  • Contribute to internal IP, playbooks, methods, and frameworks that increase clarity and consistency across engagements;
  • Present work to clients with clarity, confidence, and narrative coherence;
  • Inform research approaches, prototyping, user feedback, and qualitative and quantitative studies;
  • Progress the Experience team’s craft and strategic approaches in order to advance our clients and Proto's service offering; 
  • Teach and mentor team members within and outside your specific fields of expertise.

Qualifications

  • 5-8 years of experience in experience strategy, service or systems design role within a corporate innovation, consultancy, or venture-building context;
  • A diverse project portfolio that demonstrates highly developed design or research skills and familiarity with user research methods, design processes, and digital product environments; 
  • Proven ability to structure complex problems into clear, actionable frameworks and distill insight into decision-ready outputs;
  • Experience leading multi-stakeholder workstreams and working with client leaders;
  • Excellent written and visual communication skills (e.g., diagrams, decks, flows, blueprints).

In New York City, the base salary for this position is $130-150K. Individual compensation varies based on job-related factors including years of relevant skills and experience, level of responsibility, and qualifications. This position reports into our Partner, Head of Experience.

Proto is a New York based company with offices at 3 World Trade. Our staff is encouraged to work-from-office on days of their choosing based on personal preferences, collaboration moments, client meetings, and all-company gatherings. We also support workplace flexibility and have made work-from-anywhere available to all staff (within a 3-hour time zone of eastern standard time zone). Our core business hours are generally 9:30am-6:00pm EST; however, due to our client service model and collaborative working culture, individual working hours fluctuate to reflect client deadlines and deliverables.

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