Product Design Strategist

Product Design Strategist (Digital Feature CX Discovery, Visioning & Validation)

Contract: 6-month term (with potential extension)

Location: Hybrid / Toronto

Industry Preference: Financial Services (Insurance / Wealth / Investments)

Role Overview

This role sits at the intersection of product strategy, design thinking, ensuring that incoming ideas are well-researched, aligned to business outcomes. The successful candidate will bring structure, clarity, and insight to a high volume of requests—while facilitating alignment across a diverse global stakeholder group.

Responsibilities

Research & Insight Development

Primary research methods

• Conduct qualitative research through interviews, stakeholder discovery, journey mapping, and facilitated workshops
• Design and facilitate collaborative discovery sessions to uncover business goals, customer pain points, market nuances, and cross-functional perspectives
• Apply strong interviewing and facilitation techniques to extract meaningful insights from diverse stakeholders and build shared understanding early

Secondary research methods

• Review industry patterns, best practices, competitive experiences, and benchmarks to identify relevant signals and emerging expectations
• Identify patterns across primary and secondary inputs and synthesize them into clear, actionable themes

Synthesis & Strategic Framing

• Synthesize primary and secondary research into clear problem statements, opportunity areas, and strategic themes that inform ideation
• Translate insights into mental models, persona-based outcomes, and experience opportunity areas that help frame where and how the experience should evolve
• Provide an early strategic point of view on current-state gaps, unmet needs, and the most promising directions to explore through concepting
• Create the strategic foundation for initial experience concepts by defining what should be explored before validation begins

Concepting

• Create early-stage, high-level experience concepts to bring ideas to life before detailed design begins
• Use lightweight concepting artifacts such as flows, sketches, journey concepts, and directional prototypes to support testing and stakeholder discussion
• Explore multiple experience directions and help teams evaluate what should be tested, refined, or advanced
• Translate research and strategic inputs into concept directions that can be used to gather feedback early, reduce risk, and shape stronger downstream product and design decisions

Testing

• Plan and execute user experience validation for early-stage concepts to understand what is working well, what is not, and where refinement is needed
• Use testing to evaluate concept clarity, usability, desirability, and overall experience direction before detailed design or delivery begins
• Leverage  to run unmoderated or structured studies when speed and scale are needed, or facilitate live moderated sessions directly to probe deeper and gather richer insight
• Synthesize findings into clear recommendations so teams can confidently decide which concepts to advance, revise, or stop based on user feedback and observed behaviors.

Vision Strategy Document

• Bring together the early research, mental models, strategic themes, experience concepts, and testing learnings into a clear vision strategy document that tells the end-to-end story
• Show how the initial concepts evolved through customer validation by highlighting what worked well, what did not, and what was refined based on learning
• Provide a final point of view on the ideal and desirable future experience, including a refined concept shaped by testing and recommended as the direction moving forward
• Identify the key experience improvements and strategic themes that should inform roadmap evolution and what we build next
• Ensure the final recommendation is grounded in user insight, business value, and technical feasibility so the future-state direction is both desirable and actionable

Qualifications

• 5+ years in Product Strategy, UX Strategy, Service Design, or Design Strategy
• Experience in financial institutions (insurance, banking, or investments) strongly preferred
• Proven track record working across Multiple markets or regions, Large-scale enterprise…