Lead Service Designer

As a Lead Service Designer, you will be reporting to the Service Design Director. You will be leading projects and the relationship with key stakeholders, apply the full bandwidth of service design methods to support medium to large size projects and contribute evolving the Service Design mindset across products teams in adidas. As a Lead, you will also be responsible for guiding and managing the work of other Service designers.

Together with the agile teams and relevant stakeholders you work on continuously improving and evolving adidas products and services in order to optimize the value for the consumer. You will be cooperating with various internal stakeholders, including Markets and other Digital Sales Solutions areas to drive consumer engagement and satisfaction, as well as incremental revenues by delivering consumer-centric digital experiences. Additionally, you will play a key role in communicating the value of service design and in improving our CX approach including our service design methods and tools.

Key Responsibilities 

• Lead large and medium size service design projects, giving direction to service design team members, managing stakeholder relationships, and setting quality standards
• Continuously push to learn and evolve the service design discipline with supporting the Service design director

• Manage and lead more junior staff, providing strong performance management, providing coaching and working closely with them on their personal development and design skills
• Represent and embed CX and service design in each product area, fostering strong relationships with key stakeholders to ensure that their views and requirements are captured

• Take the lead in applying service design methods, consumer research, co-creation of ideas, concepts, journeys, blueprints, and developing high quality presentations
• Deliver training and supporting material to drive usage and adoption of service design tools within the respective teams and functions
• Lead or significantly contribute to spot service design opportunities in the organization, create proposals for SD involvement in projects and secure buy-in
• Take ownership for Talent Management processes, in order to grow, develop and retain talents
• Promote a high-performance culture by setting clear expectations and individual goals
• Translate the company goals into team specific actions and business plans. Control and monitor performance and results

Key Relationships:

• Service design team
• Product teams
• Global and Local Market teams
• Global Sales & Digital
• Tech teams

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Visual design and storytelling skills; ability to ‘think visually’ and tell a convincing story focussed on consumer value
• Comfortable presenting to stakeholders across all levels of the organization both in person and remotely

Strong methodological knowledge in the areas of CX, service design and human-centred design

• Ability to expertly apply all aspects of service design to specific challenges, regularly leading others in the application of the methods

• Experience leading small teams and managing direct reports, driving their performance and development as designers
• Strong advocate for best practices in CX and service design theory and practice, both within our team and the larger adidas community
• Ability to be “mentally agile”; to analyse, reframe and think on both a holistic and a detailed level; to think through human and rational lenses, being able to switch between the two, and know when to switch
• Sound experience of applying the design process in agile & cross-functional teams
• Ability to influence key decision makers and instil consumer-centricity into our decision-making processes
• Comfortable working with enterprise-level platforms and technologies
• Fluent in English both verbally and written

Requisite Education and Experience / Minimum Qualifications:

• Degree with focus on Service Design or a design-related discipline (e.g., Industrial Design Engineering, User-centred design, Design Strategy, Design Management, etc.) or equivalent combination of education and experience
• 6+ years of experience working in a Service Design environment, with at least 2 years’ experience leading small/ medium teams and service design projects
• Experience working with stakeholders and experts at various organizational levels