Senior Strategic Designer
Description & Requirements
ABOUT US
The Innovation & Design (I&D) team is pioneering Bain’s firm-wide efforts to meet unprecedented client demand for digital innovation, new business building, product & service solutions to drive new growth.
I&D brings together a diverse mix of Innovation Consultants, Strategic Designers, Product Managers and Tech specialists to ensure that we are supporting our clients throughout their digital transformation and innovation journey. Together, we create bold new ventures, radically improve customer experiences, driving commercial growth
with our clients by embracing digital innovation and new ways of working.
Common stages of work include:
- Discovery: Help clients understand the business, user and technology landscape. Identify priorities and assess risks to generate a transformative path forward.
- Ideation: Use design principles to guide ideation, continue to refine priorities and focus on highest potential opportunities.
- Design and Validate: Create concept experiences and value propositions for products/services based on deep user ethnography to bring an idea to life, whilst also testing customer desirability, commercial viability and tech feasibility.
- Create and Launch: Build experiences, products, services, and launch full-scale new businesses/business models
- Scale: Drive commercial growth of the corporate startup, product, or service.
We work with our clients to fully understand the impact of digital on their business and set priorities that will transform their vision into value creation and help them create new innovative businesses.
WHERE YOU’LL FIT WITHIN THE TEAM
Working within I&D as a designer provides an unparalleled opportunity to work on big, impactful challenges for leading brands and businesses and to experience and learn in multi-disciplinary teams working alongside management consultants, data scientists, and engineers on multiple different types of projects and industries.
Strategic Designers are experts in discovering and defining the right opportunities for users and businesses. They apply Design Thinking / Service Design mindset and methodologies to reframe business and organizational problems around the collective needs of users. Strategic Designers bring deep expertise in design research and concept development, translating insights into innovation and business growth opportunities.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Lead the full strategic design process hands on to transform customer insights into impactful opportunities for growth and transformation
- Lead qualitative research and synthesize learnings from both, qualitative and quantitative sources into actionable insights and tangible artifacts (e.g. personas, customer journey maps, opportunity maps, service blueprints)
- Co-facilitate ideation workshops and creative sessions
- Envision and conceptualize new business ideas and services with game-changing potential and bring them to life through creative storytelling
- Iteratively design and refine solutions through low- to high-fidelity prototyping
- Design and run experiments, tests and pilots to validate/evaluate new products, services, or businesses
- Work closely with project management to support cross-functional process management and project delivery and ensure that I&D delivers successfully
- Help ensure that I&D is successful at delivering high impact results
- Own an end-to-end deliverable and work with the supervisor to drive workstream success; help identify, prioritize, and execute on highest value add activities
- Consistently help build alignment on project priorities and backlog; enable seamless relationship with multi-disciplinary project team e.g. management consultants, data scientists, engineers, etc.
- Effectively collaborate with, co-create with, and influence multiple stakeholders (project team, client team, experts, outside partners)
- Help to bring Bain to the next level as a business
- Enhance I&D brand through support of external marketing activities
- Play an active role in the recruitment of new design talent across EMEA and in our growing team in London in particular
- Build the I&D knowledge base by capturing learnings from client engagements
- Teach and transfer knowledge, expertise, and capabilities to Bain teams and client teams
- Serve as a mentor and coach for more junior members of the (design) team
- Contribute to I&D culture creation and take on team, office, or firm initiatives as part of the EMEA I&D team
ABOUT YOU
- 3-4 years of hands-on experience shaping digital products, services, and/or new ventures (or equivalent experience) in roles such as Service Designer, Value Proposition/ Business Designer or CX Designer, etc.
- A thorough understanding of Human Centred Design, Design Thinking and Agile methods
- Skillset expertise focused on strategic and service design, research, UX, UX/UI or digital product design
- Comfort with and passion for all parts of the design process, from early-stage insights gathering, to strategy definition, concepting, and prototyping
- Fluency in working with state of collaboration and prototyping tools (e.g., Figma, Miro, Webflow, Adobe CS), exposure to GenAI Design tools
- Excellent communication, presentation and collaboration skills
- A highly ambitious and entrepreneurial spirit with the ability to thrive in a dynamic and fast-paced environment, comfortable with ambiguity
- This role requires some travel in region - up to 40% travel to clients across EMEA
- Fluency in German and English is a mandatory requirement, ideally you will be a German native speaker
- Whilst ideally you would be willing to be based in Berlin or London, we would be open to your base being another office within Germany
An ideal candidate will also have:
- Experience working in a client services / consulting environment
- An understanding of business strategy
- Passion for expanding service design practice and emerging industry trends e.g. GenAI, behavioural design, immersive experience, etc.
- Aptitude in other European languages is welcomed, in particular French and Spanish.
If this sounds like you, please apply with your CV and a current portfolio displaying a record of your experience in developing concepts and designing products and services.
WHAT MAKES US A GREAT PLACE TO WORK
Bain & Company is a global consultancy that helps the world’s most ambitious change makers define the future.
Across 65 cities in 40 countries, we work alongside our clients as one team with a shared ambition to achieve extraordinary results, outperform the competition, and redefine industries. We complement our tailored, integrated expertise with a vibrant ecosystem of digital innovators to deliver better, faster, and more enduring outcomes. Our 10-year commitment to invest more than $1 billion in pro bono services brings our talent, expertise, and insight to organizations tackling today’s urgent challenges in education, racial equity, social justice, economic development, and the environment. We earned a platinum rating from Eco Vadis, the leading platform for environmental, social, and ethical performance ratings for global supply chains, putting us in the top 1% of all companies. Since our founding in 1973, we have measured our success by the success of our clients, and we proudly maintain the highest level of client advocacy in the industry.