Service Design Practice Director

Type: Full-time

Location: Atlanta, GA, or remote (contiguous US) with 10-25% travel

Level: Director

Reports to: CEO

Benefits: Health, dental, vision coverage, 401(k), performance bonuses

Role Overview

As a Service Design Practice Director at Harmonic Design, you are a strategic leader, a master of craft, and a trusted partner to our delivery teams and clients. You will be responsible for raising the bar on delivery excellence across our portfolio, developing our senior practitioners into confident executive partners, and working in close partnership with our operations leadership to ensure consistent, high-quality execution.

This role requires a blend of design mastery, facilitation excellence, and business acumen to translate organizational challenges into systemic solutions.

Core Responsibilities

Delivery Excellence & Quality Stewardship

Quality Advocacy: You own the standard for how Harmonic delivers service design across all engagements. You ensure that our work is not only strategically sound and systemic but also helps our clients close the gap between what customers, employees, and other stakeholders experience and the operations that deliver it. You hold this bar consistently, and set clear expectations internally for what great quality looks like.

Delivery Governance: You bring visibility and intentionality to how engagements unfold. You work alongside executive partners, engagement leads, and senior practitioners to ensure methodological rigor, client alignment, and a focus on business outcomes. You identify where delivery is at risk and course-correct before problems compound.

Practice Thinking: You partner with our practice leadership team to set and evolve our approach to service design work. You articulate the principles that guide our practice and ensure they show up in every engagement.

Developing Senior Practitioners

Mentorship & Growth: You develop our most senior designers into confident consultants who can eventually lead accounts and guide client strategy at the executive level. You do this through managing designers, real work, embedding in engagements, modeling excellence, and creating conditions for them to stretch and grow.

Consulting Coaching: You help your team members develop the communication, facilitation, and relationship skills required to work effectively with Directors, VPs, and C-suite stakeholders. You model these skills and coach them through high-stakes client interactions.

Capability Building: You leave your team stronger than you found them. They are more capable in design and consulting, more confident in front of executives, and better able to see and articulate the organizational challenges that Harmonic solves.

Client Partnership & Account Support

Engagement Leadership: You work directly with clients, providing your expertise while mentoring our engagement leads and other practitioners. When you are assigned to lead engagements, you take on complex service design work with executive clients. You bring executive presence, facilitate high-stakes workshops and alignment sessions, and guide clients toward systemic solutions. You work in close partnership with our executive partners—who own account strategy and growth—to ensure delivery excellence serves the broader relationship.

Client Relationship Stewardship: You build and nurture working relationships with directors and higher stakeholders on client teams. You are a trusted partner who understands their organizational context and can translate Harmonic’s value into their language.

Operational Partnership

Design Operations Collaboration: You work in close partnership with Design Operations on resourcing decisions, project setup, and staffing. You bring a delivery perspective to these conversations, flagging skill gaps, capacity constraints, and development opportunities for the team. You do not own staffing decisions; you inform them.

Required Qualifications

Experience

• 10+ years in design, with at least 5 years in a leadership capacity within a consultancy, agency, or in-house environment.

• Demonstrated success leading complex service design engagements with Fortune 500 or similarly sophisticated clients.

Service Design Expertise

• Deep expertise in creating systemic change through service design.

• Mastery of the core methods of the practice, service strategy, service blueprinting, journey mapping, co-creation, and systems thinking.

• Mastery in defining engagement approaches based on best practices and client needs, and flexing those approaches based on new evidence as engagements unfold.

• Experience and a clear point of view on the role of AI in services and in the practice of service design.

Business Acumen

• A strong POV on how service design helps organizations address their challenges

• Ability to tie design outcomes to business metrics and client KPIs.

• Comfort discussing project P&L, scope, and delivery risk.

• Experience articulating design value to executive audiences.

Communication & Facilitation

• Demonstrated prowess in facilitation, storytelling, writing, and presentation.

• Ability to translate complex systemic challenges into compelling narratives that move executives to action.

• Comfortable in ambiguity and able to guide groups toward decisions.

Qualifications

• Degree in Design, HCI, Social Sciences, Business, or equivalent professional experience.

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary with performance incentives and profit-sharing opportunities

• 401(k) with 5% company contribution regardless of your contributions

• Flexible work context (no “work from the office” mandate)

• Employee healthcare is 100% paid by the company; dental and vision at 99%

• Two-week studio closure at the end of each year to recharge without work distractions

• Responsible Use Time off policy is not based on tenure (you’ll have flexibility from Day 1)

We Look for Leaders Who Are

Systems Thinkers: You see the connective tissue between people, processes, and technology. You understand that excellence in delivery comes from how these elements integrate.

Adaptive: You thrive when working with ambiguity and can pivot when context changes. You’re comfortable in emerging structures and growing alongside the firm.

Mentors: You are genuinely invested in developing the next generation of service design leaders. You see mentorship as core to the role, not optional.

Collaborative: You work well in partnership with Harmonic leadership, operations, account leads, and with your team. You don’t need to own everything to add value.

Articulate: You can explain the "why" behind the "what" to anyone, from a senior practitioner to a CEO. You make complex thinking accessible.

About Harmonic Design

Harmonic Design is an eight-year-old service design consultancy headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. We help large organizations, primarily Fortune 500 companies and mission-driven nonprofits, close the gap between strategy and the experiences people actually have. Our work spans discovery through delivery: research, journey design, service concept development, and the development of organizational capability to sustain what we design together.

We are a team of about 25 people, a mix of full-time practitioners and contractors, who take the work seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. We are a studio, not a factory.

Engagements are complex, client relationships are long, and the thinking we bring to our clients, we also bring to how we run the firm.

We are in an intentional period of growth. We are investing in operational infrastructure, leadership depth, and external partnerships to scale without losing what makes the work good.

This role is part of that investment.

Base salary: $185,000 to $205,000, set on an 18-month review cycle. Placement within the range reflects depth of consulting leadership experience, Fortune 500 track record, and readiness to lead engagements from day one.

Performance bonus: Two components, paid annually.

• Personal performance bonus of 8 to 12 percent of base, tied to practice quality, practitioner development outcomes, and engagement leadership.

• Company performance bonus of 4 to 6 percent of base, tied to firm profitability and cash position

Combined bonus upside runs 12 to 18 percent of base.

Retirement: 401(k) with a 5 percent company contribution, made regardless of whether or not you contribute.

Benefits: Employer-paid medical at 100 percent, dental vision at 99 percent for the employee.

Flexibility: No office mandate, no tenure-based time-off policy (flexibility from day one)

Quality of life: Two-week studio closure at year's end. We’re all off at the same time to recharge.