Lead Experience (CX) Designer

The Lead Experience Designer is the craft lead of Al Tayer Insignia's Experience Design practice, translating experience strategy into concrete, tested design work across physical, digital, and phygital touchpoints. Reporting into the Head of Experience Design, they turn the vision for our brands' differentiating experiences into detailed journey maps, service blueprints, and prototypes that teams across the business can act on. All designed with clear and relevant customer and stakeholder personas in mind.

This role builds and maintains the detailed evidence base, from journey maps to service blueprints, that brings customer intelligence, VoC, and journey insight to life as tangible, testable design work, across each phase of the end-to-end customer journeys.

The Lead Experience Designer runs ambitious design projects seemlessly, and is able to follow the end-to-end design process, including is the primary design partner on Amber's clienteling platform and other priority experience initiatives, shaping both member-facing journeys and front-liner/sales associate tools, and ensuring these are grounded in real customer and store needs.

While they focus predominantly on CX Design & Service Design, they have experience in UX design and UI as well as in prototyping. They fully understand product roles and are able to collaborate seemlessly with them.

A hands-on designer, with the right blend of strong critical thinking and creative abilities, the Lead Experience Designer works closely with brand and vertical stakeholders, Digital and product teams, and IT, and, as well as with store teams, customer care, and other customer-facing roles. They master empathy and need states analysis, and are able to understand unique brand strategies to design the corresponding moments and journeys, in context.

Beyond project work, they support the Head of Experience Design in shaping the playbooks, capabilities and strategic avenues required to establish a strong and impactful Experience Design function.

Strategic Roles and Responsibilities

• Contribute design craft expertise to the Head of Experience Design's roadmap, ensuring strategic priorities are translated into detailed, actionable design work.
• Help define and maintain design methodology, standards, and documentation as the Experience Design practice scales.
• Translate worldclass brand DNA and brand strategies into inspiring and differentiating experiences.
• Bring customer intelligence, trends, and journey insight into the design process, ensuring interventions are grounded in evidence rather than assumption.
• Support the design agenda for reinventing experiential retail formats, including Department Stores, online flagships, Amber, and new concepts.

Functional Roles and Responsibilities

• Build detailed customer journey maps and service blueprints per brand, segment, and touchpoint.
• Design and prototype clienteling tools, front-liner/sales associate interfaces, and customer-facing experience concepts, particularly for our top brands and Amber.
• Collaborate with Customer Intelligence to run qualitative research (shop-alongs, staff interviews, mystery shopping input, concept testing) to feed design decisions.
• Deploy Design Thinking methodologies in day-to-day project work, onboarding stakeholders to the approach where needed.
• Design signature moments that balance creative differentiation with commercial impact.
• Collaborate with a wide variety of functions and enablers, to ensure that the designs are co-created, generate strong buy-in, and get implemented as intended.
• Maintain design documentation and playbooks to ensure consistency and reusability across brands.
• Support the Head of Experience Design and Customer Intelligence team in tracking and continuously improving key journeys.

People Management Roles and Responsibilities

• Mentor and provide craft guidance to other designers, interns, or agency resources working on Experience Design projects.
• Collaborate closely with the Head of Experience Design to build out the wider Experience Design team as it grows.
• Act as a design role model to stakeholders beyond the immediate team, helping build design literacy across the business.
• Work closely with store teams, customer care, and other front-line teams to keep design grounded in operational reality.

Education/Certification and Continued Education

• Academic background in Design, Creative, UX/Service Design, or related field. CCXP or UX-related credentials a plus.
  

Years of Experience

• 4-7 years in CX/service design and UX design, ideally in luxury retail, hospitality, or premium omnichannel environments.

Knowledge and Skills

• Strong fluency in journey mapping, service blueprinting, and prototyping tools (Figma or equivalent; bonus: no-code prototyping such as bolt.new).
• Ability to work across physical and digital touchpoints, not just screens.
• Comfort running qualitative research and translating findings into design decisions.
• Strong documentation habits, able to produce design artefacts others can act on.
• Ability to work autonomously on detailed craft while staying aligned to broader strategic direction.
• Comfortable presenting work to senior stakeholders and cross-functional teams.