Head of Customer Experience Design

Role overview

Strategic responsibilities

• Define the experience design vision and multi-year roadmap across physical, digital, and phygital touchpoints.
• Build the experience design function, including methodology, standards, tools, governance, and talent.
• Translate customer intelligence, trends, and journey insights into differentiating design interventions.
• Set the design agenda across department stores, online flagships, the Amber loyalty programme, and new concepts.
• Guide investments through design input to business cases and OKRs, and support experience-led innovation.

Functional responsibilities

• Own end-to-end journey mapping and service design across the customer lifecycle, connecting strategy, CX design, UX, and UI.
• Deploy Design Thinking methods and onboard stakeholders.
• Design signature moments balancing creative differentiation with commercial impact.
• Collaborate on personas, trends, insights, concept testing, and customer co-creation.
• Track and continuously improve key journeys with clear ownership.

People and collaboration

• Manage the Experience Design unit and drive collaboration with relevant teams.
• Coach experience design craft, prototyping, and strategic, brand-led thinking.
• Align design work with brand and business priorities and foster an experience design culture.
• Work with Digital and IT to ensure designs are technically feasible and implemented.
• Partner with store, customer care, and frontline teams to ground design in operational reality and customer needs.

Experience and qualifications

• 8–10+ years in experience or service design; luxury retail, hospitality, or premium omnichannel experience is ideal.
• Retail experience is mandatory.
• Fluency in design frameworks, experience design, and UX design is required.
• A proven record of designing and scaling a CX or experience design practice is required.
• A proven record in knowledge sharing, inspiration, influence, and culture shaping is required.
• Strong collaboration abilities are required.
• The candidate must bridge business strategy, creative design, trends analysis, brand strategy, and financial outcomes.
• The candidate must work strategically with senior stakeholders while contributing hands-on craft and guiding a team.