Design Director, Human Centered Design (Chief Designer – Experience)

The Chief Designer - Experience leads a multi-disciplinary design team, owning a specific brand domain and driving its strategic design direction. You'll identify customer, business, and technology opportunities, guiding project teams to ideate, visualize, and prototype future experiences.

You'll champion a holistic approach to experience design, starting with the customer and rapidly iterating solutions to deliver desirable, technically feasible, and strategically aligned experiences that are viable at scale; orchestrating seamlessly across physical and digital enablers to deliver one cohesive experience. You're a strategic leader and natural collaborator, bringing multidisciplinary design teams together to set and achieve a shared vision.

You'll apply brand domain-specific expertise and overall experience design leadership to influence product vision, strategy, roadmaps, and decision-making. You'll partner cross-functionally across Ford, including Design, Marketing, Technology, Program Management, CX, and key business units, aligning on future program planning and objectives. Your focus is on finding creative alignment across all disciplines and ensuring business strategy translates into innovative experiences that delight users. You're exceptionally well-versed in modern product and experience creation, capable of leading a team in the right direction even within complex and ambiguous opportunity spaces.

What you'll do:

• Define strategic briefs and lead project execution: Define the problem and opportunity, set learning objectives for research, collaborate on research, translate insights into prototypes, and define assumptions and plans for testing.
• Oversee the design and development of end-to-end experiences within the domain, ensuring physical and digital enablers are designed and timed together as one cohesive system.
• Be a hands-on leader: Generate ideas, actively participate in ideation and co-creation sessions, and inspire teams to do the same.
• Embody Ford Design culture: Foster a visionary and innovative design culture within the team, encouraging bold thinking, creativity, and a collaborative environment.
• Represent the Experience Design function: Collaborate across departments, ensuring a human-centered focus throughout.
• Influence product vision and strategy: Apply domain expertise and experience design leadership.
• Communicate strategic recommendations: Clearly articulate the “why” behind the “what” to diverse stakeholders.
• Oversee multiple projects: Maintain high quality, accuracy, and impact. Ensure on-time delivery, effective outcomes, and project team success through clear and measurable goals.
• Identify opportunities for business value: Articulate the rationale for design solutions in the context of business and user needs.
• Continuously evaluate and refine ideas: Collaborate with others to improve ideas for distinctiveness, relevance, and effectiveness.

About Experience Design HCD at Ford:

At Ford, we use human-centered design (HCD) to create meaningful experiences that shape the way the world moves. We are a design organization that designs, defines, and partners to deliver integrated experiences to customers.

Ford is committed to envisioning and crafting simple, thoughtful, enjoyable, and compelling products and services for our customers! We’re in the midst of the biggest change the automotive industry has ever seen. Just as cars changed the world over the last century, new technologies such as self-driving cars, electric powertrains, and connected vehicles will radically reshape how we live, work, and play in the next hundred years. You’ll be at the heart of creating that future. You’ll craft every touchpoint our customers encounter, designing people and society’s needs into the heart of our next generation of products, services, and experiences. You’ll also be designing at scale. Every day, Ford’s vehicles, and services support millions of people around the world. So, we’re not just inventing the future, we’re operationalizing it, to help all those people move through their lives better.

We create differentiating experiences that delight users through empathy, creativity, and design. We are looking for creative individuals that are innovative, curious, urgent, experimental, and always thinking about the human on the other end of the design to join us and help further the vision and mission of HCD at Ford.

You'll have:

• Bachelor’s degree in Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Human Factors, or a closely related human-centered field; or equivalent practical experience in experience design leadership.
• 10+ years of work experience (8 years with a Master’s degree).
• 5+ years of experience applying human-centered design methods, designing across physical and digital touchpoints, with the ability to align hardware, software, and service elements into a single, cohesive customer experience.
• Deep understanding of the human-centered design process and proven application of knowledge of user experience principles, from research to prototyping to product release.
• 4+ years of experience leading multidisciplinary design teams.

Even better, you may have:

• Master’s degree in Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Human Factors, or a closely related human-centered field.
• Passion for the automotive and mobility industry; fluency in technology and product innovation
• Experience working in or with creative cultures
• Passion for collaborative environments that encourage the sharing of ideas and openness to feedback, learning, and iteration
• Experience working in highly collaborative environments and skill as an open and willing resource to team members in assessing designs
• Experience working in large, corporate environments; ability to navigate complexity and execute under tight timelines
• Experience managing multiple stakeholders across complex projects
• Experience presenting to executive audiences; exceptional communication skills

You may not check every box, or your experience may look a little different from what we've outlined, but if you think you can bring value to Ford Motor Company, we encourage you to apply!

As an established global company, we offer the benefit of choice. You can choose what your Ford future will look like: will your story span the globe, or keep you close to home? Will your career be a deep dive into what you love, or a series of new teams and new skills? Will you be a leader, a changemaker, a technical expert, a culture builder…or all of the above? No matter what you choose, we offer a work life that works for you, including:
• Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up child care and more
• Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, and more
• Vehicle discount program for employees and family members and management leases
• Tuition assistance
• Established and active employee resource groups
• Paid time off for individual and team community service
• A generous schedule of paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day
• Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.
This position is leadership level 5 and ranges from $141,700-$268,300.
Final determination of salary grade will be based on candidate's skills and experience, and base salary will be set within the applicable range according to job scope, responsibility and competitive market value.

For more information on salary and benefits, click here: https://fordcareers.co/LL5

Visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

Candidates for positions with Ford Motor Company must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, age, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status or protected veteran status. In the United States, if you need a reasonable accommodation for the online application process due to a disability, please call 1-888-336-0660.

This position is hybrid with a requirement to be onsite four or more days per week. #LI-Hybrid

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