Experience Strategist

At Gensler, the value of our work stems from its positive impact on the human experience. We are a dynamic and collaborative design firm uniting creativity, research, and innovation to solve complex problems for our clients. Our work challenges conventional ideas about architecture and the built environment. We aren’t just designing buildings—we are reimagining cities and places that make a difference in people’s lives.

Founded in 1965, Gensler has built a team of 6,000 professionals who partner with clients in over 100 countries each year. Everything we do is guided by our mission: to create a better world through the power of design.

Your Role

Gensler’s London Office is seeking an exceptionally talented Experience Strategist to join our team of design thinkers and doers who specialise in driving engagement between people, brands and the various environments in which they intersect. We believe that a strong and consistent strategy is the foundation of a successfully designed experience, and we embed strategy across the many projects we deliver. We are seeking an Experience Strategist to be responsible for creating strategies for a range of projects.

Please note, this role is not remote. We believe that a vibrant office culture that enables learning, creativity, and our collaboration is foundational to our collective success and impact. Gensler is also committed to providing the flexibility that enables our People First culture to thrive. We understand that the future of work involves flexibility and that continues to be an essential part of our policy.

Who we’re looking for:

• You are skilled and highly proficient in user-centred strategy and insight-driven design.
• You’re an empathetic champion of the user, with an insatiable curiosity for their motivations and needs, fluent in the end-to-end customer journey.
• You have experience working within the built environment, and have worked on projects which emphasize how audiences navigate and travel through space
• You’re someone who can synthesize and translate abstract and complex concepts and content into simple, innovative solutions that frame clear opportunities to build strong product and service experiences.
• You’re a seasoned practitioner who can zoom in and out and thrives at the intersection of data, technology, place, service and creativity.
• You have an ability to look at a situation, deconstruct it, and devise a way to make it better.
• You’re a restless futurist, inspired by brand and business innovation as well as emerging technologies, while remaining keenly focused on solving the needs of today’s brands.
• You’re an analytical and technically minded problem solver with a brain for logic, data, and patterns. You know how to call on both the analytical and creative sides of your brain to help find that perfect balance that changes the way humans experience the digital and physical world.
• You enjoy pushing a vision and bringing it to life.
• You know how to create strategies and deliverables that provide perspective, inspire innovation, and drive decisions and outcomes.
• You’re able to uncover, synthesize, and explain the complex in a clear, simple, and actionable way.
• You flourish when thinking about delivering world-class, ecosystem powered omnichannel experiences that drive your clients’ business.
• You thrive partnering with different groups, serving as a catalyst to help the team design, deliver and optimise relevant solutions for our clients and their users.
• You have the appetite to inspire and promote collaboration across disciplines to spark innovation and disruption, motivate talent and support design experimentation across the office, region, and firm.

What You Will Do

• Work directly with clients at the outset of an assignment to define (or redefine) the right opportunity and the right problem to solve.
• Present directly to clients, building a relationship by ensuring their goals and ambitions are able to be achieved through our proposed strategies and solutions.
• Provide insights to help devise world-class strategies that contribute to thoughtful solutions by helping develop deliverables including research plans and analysis, experience briefs, customer journeys, roadmaps, workshops, and retail strategies.
• You’ll provide strategic inputs throughout the creation of the products – from vision and conception to launch and optimisation.
• You’ll challenge both clients and peers to think about opportunities that solve business challenges while meeting brand and customer needs.
• You’ll work closely with a multi-disciplinary group of Strategists, Analysts, Planners, Architects, and Designers to develop engaging solutions for clients, demonstrating and inspiring the client and team by showing your knowledge and your craft.

Your Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in creating human-centred design, signage and wayfinding strategy, service design, and/or experience strategies, preferably for clients in the lifestyle sector (retail, hospitality, entertainment, etc).
• Have worked in a progressive, creatively-driven environment that embraces strategy as part of the core design process.
• Proven track record creating strategies, including customer journeys, archetypes, experience briefs, strategic POVs and workshops that manifest into solutions that cut across the digital and physical worlds.
• Experience working in dynamic conditions and on multiple workstreams that require fast iterations and pivoting between collaborative and individual work
• Experience in executing research initiatives to gather additional content focused requirements.
• Experience in designing and supporting engaging workshops with internal teams, clients, and other stakeholders
• Ability to develop compelling communications that help clients to visualise and understand the benefits and implications of strategies and recommendations
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills while working with teams, clients, and other partners
• Self-motivated and entrepreneurial
• Comfortable with the ambiguity of working in and defining unknown spaces
• Experience with pitch presentations and proposal development
• The ability to respond proactively and thoughtfully to design critique and feedback from clients and colleagues
• The ability to infuse empathy and behavioral analysis into your work
• Familiarity with design research methodologies and processes

Technical Requirements

• Proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign required), and Microsoft Office (PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Outlook), and other visual communication tools
• Fluency with digital collaboration tools such as Miro, Mural, Microsoft Teams etc.
• Familiarity with website development software/language, Readymag, Square Space and other technologies is a plus
• Familiarity with rapid prototyping tools such as Invision, Sketch, and AdobeXD a plus

Life at Gensler

We encourage every person at Gensler to lead a healthy and balanced life. Our comprehensive benefits include medical and dental insurance, season ticket loans, pension and twice annual bonus opportunities.

As part of the firm’s commitment to professional development, Gensler offers reimbursement for certain professional qualifications and associated renewals and exam fees. In addition, we reimburse tuition for certain eligible programmes or classes. We view our professional development programmes as strategic investments in our future.