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 UserTesting.com 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 environments, Complex stakeholder ecosystems

Core Skills

• Strategic thinking with strong ability to connect dots across inputs
• Advanced qualitative research and interviewing skills
• Exceptional research synthesis and storytelling ability
• Strong concept development and experience visioning capability
• Experience with usability testing and concept validation
• Strong facilitation and stakeholder influence skills
• Ability to apply systems thinking across complex journeys, products, and markets
• Strong executive communication and strategic storytelling skills
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and bring structure to complex problems
• Experience working with personas, journey maps, and service design frameworks

Technical Skills

• Proficiency with Figma and FigJam for concept development, journey visualization, and collaborative working sessions
• Experience using UserTesting.com or similar platforms for concept testing and user validation
• Experience working within agile product environments
• Familiarity with Atlassian tools such as Jira and Confluence for documentation and cross-functional collaboration

Additional Information

This role represents an active vacancy at Havas. You will be joining a collaborative, growth-oriented environment where ideas are encouraged and career development is supported. The base hourly range for this position is CAD 65-80 with final compensation determined based on factors such as work location, skills, experience, and background. Havas uses artificial intelligence-enabled tools to support certain aspects of the recruitment process. All hiring decisions are made by our recruiting and hiring teams.

About HAVAS CX

Havas CX is a global network of digital agencies dedicated to creating meaningful experiences across the customer journey. With deep capabilities in business transformation, experience design, CRM, and technology, we partner with leading brands to deliver exceptional digital products and services across B2B and B2C markets.

Our culture is people-first, collaborative, and driven by innovation. We are deeply committed to investing in the professional development of our team members, providing ample opportunities to expand skills, take on diverse challenges, and contribute to high-impact projects. Our passion for what we do drives us. Joining our team means being part of a culture and organization that prioritizes growth, innovation, and the pursuit of excellence…not to mention you would make some pretty cool new friends!