GM - Experience Design

Job Description

Role Summary

The Director/GM, Experience Design is a senior experience design leadership role responsible for establishing, governing, and scaling world-class 360-degree customer experience across products, software interfaces, service journeys, training, support, warranty, repair, upgrades, and customer communications. The role includes design system maturity, CX governance in the product development process, cross-functional delivery capability, and AI-enabled experience design transformation.

Senior UX/CX leadership roles are expected to set experience vision, build multidisciplinary teams, align design with product and engineering roadmaps, embed research and usability into delivery workflows, govern design systems, and report customer impact through measurable qualitative and quantitative metrics.

This role is expected to create and staff a product engineering team comprising hardware product engineers and transportation designers that can work closely with project managers. All members of this team would have designed and launched consumer facing automotive products, and have had extensive experience working with the two other functions.

Key Responsibilities

Cross-functional Delivery of World-Class Customer Experience

• Build, hire, coach, and deploy the right talent to deliver consistent customer experience across product, engineering, operations, marketing, customer support, service, and training touchpoints.
• Define CX goals and operating model for cross-functional teams, including responsibilities, governance forums, review checkpoints, and decision rights.
• Train existing cross-functional talent on customer-centric thinking, usability, design system adoption, journey thinking, and experience-quality standards.

Envision and Govern 360-Degree Customer Experience

• Define the end-to-end customer experience vision across marketing, merchandising, training, end-use workflows, customer support, warranty, service, repair, and upgrade journeys.
• Establish consistent interaction patterns, visual standards, content conventions, service principles, and customer effort reduction targets across channels.
• Conduct customer journey mapping, workflow analysis, usability testing, voice-of-customer research, task-completion analysis, and friction heatmap reviews.
• Report CX impact through design system adoption, consistency audit scores, customer effort score, top-workflow steps, rework rate, support contact rate, proactive vs reactive support ratio, and experience drift index.

CX Processes and Product Development Governance

• Embed CX research as a mandatory part of the product development process and ensure customer evidence informs product and engineering decisions.
• Institutionalize the PRD to XRD to Engineering Requirements workflow, ensuring experience requirements are traceable, testable, and enforced.
• Own CX lifecycle management, including design approval, deviation approval, change approval, experience release readiness, and post-release feedback loops.
• Create governance artifacts such as CX acceptance criteria, experience risk logs, design review records, usability findings, and design-system compliance reports.

Build Scalable CX Capability and Leadership Pipeline

• Deploy CX talent into vertical product teams while maintaining central governance, design standards, and shared design system ownership.
• Build career paths, competency frameworks, succession plans, mentoring routines, retention mechanisms, and performance evaluation inputs for UX/CX talent.
• Create a high-accountability culture that balances customer advocacy, engineering feasibility, product velocity, mission reliability, and business impact.

AI-Powered Customer Experience

• Assess where AI can augment or replace repetitive CX skills, research synthesis, support triage, prototyping, design review, documentation, and journey analytics.
• Design AI-enabled CX processes that retain human-centered principles, safety, explainability, and trust for mission-critical drone platform contexts.
• Recruit, train, and upskill teams for AI-assisted research, design operations, prototyping, content generation, analytics, and human-AI interaction design.
• Implement AI-enabled CX improvements within the product development process and measure whether they match or exceed current process outcomes.

Skills and Competencies

• Deep CX, UX, service design, design systems, and usability expertise across digital, physical, support, service, and training touchpoints.
• Strong understanding of product management, engineering, operations, customer support, mission workflows, and product development governance.
• Ability to translate customer insights into experience requirements, acceptance criteria, design standards, and measurable product/engineering decisions.
• Agile and Lean methodologies, research operations, design operations, design QA, accessibility, journey mapping, and usability testing.
• Leadership, hiring, coaching, mentoring, succession planning, communication, facilitation, and conflict resolution across product and engineering stakeholders.
• AI literacy for customer experience: human-AI interaction, AI-assisted research/design workflows, ethical and trustworthy AI experience principles, prompt/prototype evaluation, and productivity measurement.

Education and Experience

• Bachelor degree required; Master degree preferred in Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, Industrial Design, Psychology, Engineering, Product Design, Computer Science, or related field.
• 10-15+ years of experience in UX, product design, service design, CX, design systems, or product-led experience leadership, including experience leading multidisciplinary design/research teams.
• Demonstrated experience scaling design systems, design governance, user research practices, design operations, and cross-functional experience quality in complex technology environments.
• Experience with enterprise, mission-critical, hardware-software, robotics, UAV, industrial technology, aerospace/defense, or regulated product environments is preferred.
• Portfolio or case studies showing measurable impact on usability, customer effort, adoption, consistency, support reduction, product quality, or customer trust.

Working Interfaces

Internal: R&D, Engineering, Product Management, Product Design, Business Development, Marketing, Customer Support, Operations, Training, Service, Quality, and Delivery teams.

External: Key customers and operators, field users, service partners, design/research agencies, training partners, ecosystem experts, and technology vendors.

First 6-12 Month Success Indicators

• Baseline CX maturity assessment completed across products, support, training, service, and customer-facing digital touchpoints.
• Design system roadmap, governance model, and adoption targets agreed with product and engineering leadership.
• PDP CX governance implemented with mandatory CX research, PRD-XRD-engineering traceability, and review/approval checkpoints.
• Core customer journeys mapped and prioritized by mission criticality, customer effort, support impact, revenue impact, and product risk.
• AI-powered CX use cases piloted with measurable process-quality or cycle-time improvement.

Skills