Principal Service Designer

About the team

Design at Gusto is made up of over 60 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We’re a cross-functional bunch focused on Design, Research, Writing, Ops, and Front-end Development who are always looking for opportunities to build understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto. We don’t care a whole lot about swim lanes and we work closely with our partners in Product, Engineering, Data, CX, Marketing, and Sales to design, build, and ship holistic customer experiences that make a difference. We are passionate advocates for thoughtful, crafted, and inclusive experiences and we believe great design can make hard things possible, even delightful. Read more about Design at Gusto.

About the opportunity 

You will take ownership of the Service Design capability at Gusto, managing a small team of Service Designers to evolve service design processes and methodologies across Gusto actively, and apply those processes and methods to identify and solve complex customer problems - linking people, process, and product interactions to create a holistic and exceptional service experience for Gusto customers. 

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Foster a high-performance, high psychologically safe culture that maximizes customer value creation and customer retention.
• Grow and develop the service design practice at Gusto - Build the frameworks, and approaches that can be deployed by teams across Gusto, including - custom documentation libraries to facilitate cross-functional consensus for service improvements, learning & development tracks for Service Design, and intake prioritization processes for Service Design efforts. 
• Plans and leads service design activities to support strategic transformation initiatives as well as iterative improvements.
• Leverages design thinking to understand customer needs and evolve the customer experience.
• Develops in-depth understanding of customer experience using quantitative and qualitative insights.
• Partner with a variety of teams to concept, blueprint, and implement compelling service experiences that are cohesive, inclusive, and impactful.
• Collaborate with Gusto product development teams to ensure consistency across interface experiences across different user scenarios.
• Designs exceptional service moments.
• Plan and lead co-creation workshops with internal stakeholders to identify opportunities and design new service experiences.
• Communicate vision and concepts clearly and persuasively for a variety of audiences including executive-level, to create alignment and motivate action.

Here’s what we’re looking for:

• 12+ years of Service Design experience within a design agency or an in-house Design or Product team. Experience design, interaction design, or product design experience are a plus.
• Experience as a Service Designer in an at-scale tech company environment, where they work closely with a Design, Product, or Functional Leader (CX or Revenue) to design holistic and differentiated service experiences.
• Broad and comprehensive understanding of design practices across product, brand, and service.
• Proven track record of building differentiation, loyalty, and long-term business value by meeting users' needs and exceeding their expectations.
• Proficient at capturing interactions and surfacing experience opportunities - you have multiple tools to help map out user journeys and end-to-end experiences. 
• Experience leading cross-discipline teams and exemplify strong leadership. 
• Comfortable (and excited by!) working closely with senior-level stakeholders and leadership - history of effective communication with all levels of management and company personnel.
• You’re able to plan, prioritize, and organize effectively and independently - working effectively with data and teams to focus efforts and choose the most impactful moments to design for. 
• Able to proactively bring together groups of individuals to solve a problem and enable others to understand and execute the resulting vision with a service blueprint.

Our cash compensation range for this role is $207,000/yr to $259,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $243,000/yr to $279,000/yr in San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.