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Job Description
Mud Bay’s mission is to contribute to the health of dogs, cats, and the happiness of those who care for them while building a family-and employee-owned company we can be proud of.
The Innovation Team at Mud Bay drives key strategic initiatives, addresses critical business challenges, and assists with the design and execution of projects, programs, and strategies. Because of you, projects are effective, people are inspired, stakeholders are engaged, and innovation thrives at Mud Bay in this design-based role.
Primary Objectives.
· Strategy & Synthesis. People and their pets are the guiding principle along the whole design process. All projects involve future visioning by curating relevant insights, trends, and signals to formulate future scenarios, implications, and opportunities that are plausible and probable – while challenging the status quo. Insights are derived from creative synthesis of customer research, market analysis, and future visioning. Creative synthesis is visualized through personas, customer journeys, insight-opportunity frameworks, system maps, stories, visual concepts, and scenarios.
· Collaborative Design & Development. Unique ideas within multidisciplinary workshops, meetings, and immersion sessions are brought to life through visual communication and strong written narratives leveraging your immersive, story-telling skills. This happens by driving the design and facilitation of co-creation sessions, as well as immersive workshops (in-person and virtual). Design thinking techniques are at the center of conceptual development of products, services, and/or physical connected form-factors. Innovative ideas are visualized to a set of tangible and digital products, services and/or physical connected form-factors in partnership with researchers, program managers, and other key stakeholders. Ideas are communicated using techniques, including product concepts, service models, customer journeys, industrial designs, system maps, and/or infographics. All work is designed through iterative learning, testing, and measurement approaches to define and refine disruptive business models, products, processes, and services.
· Practice Champion. All work is championed through Human-Centered Design on multidisciplinary teams. Insights, concepts, and design rationales are communicated to internal and external audiences. This happens through your direct contribution to the creation and evolution of strategic design deliverables and methodologies throughout Mud Bay.
· Learn, Build, Measure. Projects are designed and managed within a framework of discovery, experimentation, and result-oriented process cycles. This is achieved by effectively assisting teams through the divergent to convergent journey from a design point of view.
· Planning To Outcomes. Projects will have measurable success criteria. This is achieved by partnering with Program Management, Research, and other stakeholder groups to identify key insights leading to qualitative and quantitative metrics.
· Customer Success. Partnerships are curated within in a cross-disciplinary fashion with business strategists, program managers, researchers, technologists, and growth architects to ensure that new business ventures and enterprise initiatives are set up to deliver strategic value in line with design intent. Audiences are engaged, within the markets of interest, and commercialization assumptions are tested for audience capture and scaling during new venture builds, including influencing all customer touching aspects of the business (e.g. growth, branding, content strategy, and experience design). Service Blueprints are connected to customer experience and business processes to ensure cohesive and customer centric operations. Processes are implemented to ensure customer success throughout the launched experience from initial enticement to service and end of customer experience (e.g. branding, sales, onboarding, customer service). This happens by developing concierge pilots and proof of concepts to gather feedback from customers of first product iterations.
The Senior Strategic Designer We’re Looking For…
· You are curious, especially about breaking down complexities within business process and design related questions – you enjoy looking at problems from different angles and using your creative skills, knowledge, data, and insights to conquer a challenge.
· You are a self-starter, with a strong work ethic. You consider yourself resourceful, with an ability to multi-task. You also seek out feedback and collaborative solutions for ambiguous challenges.
· You know your way around design and innovation methods and tools for facilitation, concept creation, and collaboration. You will need design and technical aptitude to be successful in this role, this includes being able to use tools to support projects, communication, and the presentation of information. You have at least 8+ years of work experience and have a track record delivering tangible concepts to market, with at least 5+ years leading creative projects to successful completion. You have demonstrated experience working on multidisciplinary teams in the development of disruptive new concepts for or within a corporate setting. You have an outstanding portfolio of work demonstrating your design abilities.
· You are a problem solver, having demonstrated ability to successfully coordinate with multiple groups to drive problem-solving activities while managing competing priorities. You have deep human centered design capabilities. You are driven by design thinking and an agile experimentation approach to problem solving. You can own future visioning and strategy development through creative synthesis, concept ideation, and visual storytelling skills.
· You are an experienced communicator, highly skilled at creating visuals to convey information. Your messages are clear, concise, and compelling. You can effectively present information in a variety of formats to a broad audience. Your work reflects a solid grasp of qualitative and quantitative research, divergent exploration, conceptual development, design strategy, and the craft of design (whether industrial, service, experience, visual, etc.)
· You balance creative and analytical skills and are highly effective at mining qualitative and quantitative data from internal and external sources. You are skilled at aggregating disparate information into actionable insights and converting those insights into new holistic concepts.
Job Details.
· Hours and location. This position is full time and spends time working in our Home Office in Olympia, Washington, remotely from home, and out in the field testing/learning. The division of time spent between work locations varies and is driven by priorities and projects.
· Primary Team. The Innovation Team Senior Strategic Designer is a member of Mud Bay’s Innovation Team, and currently reports to the Chief Innovation Officer. This position does not have any direct reports.
· Experience. This position requires 8+ years’ experience with at least 5+ years leading creative projects to successful completion.
· Compensation. The Innovation Team Senior Strategic Designer compensation pay range depends on qualifications, experience, and seniority. Salary range for this position is between $100,000 – $126,500.
· Benefits. This position is eligible for Mud Bay’s standard benefits package including medical, dental, and vision; Mud Bay’s Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP); staff discount on Mud Bay purchases; 401k available; funds employee contributes to 401k are matched with a contribution into Mud Bay’s ESOP once eligible.
· We don’t discriminate. We don’t discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, sex, pregnancy (including the potential to get pregnant, pregnancy-related conditions, childbearing, childbirth, or related medical conditions), religion, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, age, sexual orientation, gender identity (including gender expression), marital or family status, physical, mental, or sensory disability (including the use of a trained dog guide or service animal), military, uniform servicemember, or veteran status (including status as an honorably discharged veteran), genetic information, HIV/AIDS or hepatitis C status, status as a victim of sexual abuse, (including domestic abuse, sexual assault, or stalking), or on any other basis protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws.
