# Design Director, Human Centered Design (Chief Designer – Experience) **Company**: Ford Motor Company **Location**: Dearborn, MI **Work arrangement**: hybrid **Experience**: senior **Job type**: full-time **Salary**: $141,700-$268,300 **Category**: Design **Industry**: Automotive **Wikidata**: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q44294 **Apply**: https://efds.fa.em5.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperience/en/sites/CX_1/job/71428?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply **Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_94328bfa-308 ## Description The Chief Designer - Experience leads a multi-disciplinary design team, owning a specific brand domain and driving its strategic design direction. You will identify customer, business, and technology opportunities, guiding project teams to ideate, visualize, and prototype future experiences. You will 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 are a strategic leader and natural collaborator, bringing multidisciplinary design teams together to set and achieve a shared vision. You will apply brand domain-specific expertise and overall experience design leadership to influence product vision, strategy, roadmaps, and decision-making. You will 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 are 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. ## Responsibilities - 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. ## Qualifications - 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. ## Benefits - 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. ## Skills ### Required - human-centered design - experience design leadership - multidisciplinary design teams - user experience principles ### Nice to have - Master’s degree in Design - passion for the automotive and mobility industry - fluency in technology and product innovation --- Source: [Apply at efds.fa.em5.oraclecloud.com](https://efds.fa.em5.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperience/en/sites/CX_1/job/71428?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)