Senior Business Designer

About this role

SF IDEO Senior BxD Designer

IDEO San Francisco is in search of a Senior Business Designer who will frame complex business problems, translate insights into viable growth opportunities, and drive ideas toward real-world activation.

The role:

At IDEO, we help clients move forward when the path isn’t clear — whether driven by ambition, responding to disruption, or breaking out of entrenched ways of working.

As a Senior Business Designer, you’ll help teams and organizations turn bold ideas into viable, real-world outcomes — shaping new products, services, and ventures while building the business models, strategies, and pathways to bring them to market. Working across the spectrum from insight to execution, you’ll use business tools, systems thinking, entrepreneurial creativity, and strategic analysis to drive competitive advantage and strategic growth for our clients.

The right person for this role has strong business acumen and strategic instincts, with experience in growth strategy, product management, go-to-market execution, or venture creation. They’re comfortable navigating ambiguity, working with multi-disciplinary teams, influencing senior stakeholders and building conviction for new ideas. They quickly understand how a business creates and captures value, connecting market insights, customer needs, and financial drivers into compelling strategies — moving work forward with the right balance of rigor and creativity to drive real impact.

Why is this role important for IDEO’s work?

Business Designers make the biggest impact by turning ambiguity into clarity and connecting insights to commercially viable opportunities. Their skillset is critical to our work because they bring together strategy, business decision making, market understanding and business model thinking to help clients create and capture value. We count on them to move work beyond ideas into action and provide clear, informed pathways for winning investments.

Once here you will:

• Creatively problem-solve by generating new ideas, viable business models, value propositions and go-to-market strategies for new products, services, and ventures, exploring unconventional or hidden solutions in a business context

• Build an understanding of IDEO’s client organizations, and partner with clients to drive change and innovation within their teams and organizations

• Conduct market, competitive, and financial analysis to identify new and emerging opportunities, inform decisions, shape business cases, and build conviction for new ideas

• Synthesize research, data, and insights into clear narratives that guide decision-making and align stakeholders

• Translate complexity into action by developing and leading experiments or pilots that produce insights to help create innovation roadmaps to scale recommendations in real-world contexts

• Collaborate in multidisciplinary teams with designers across all creative and technical disciplines (design research, interaction design, data science, communication design, etc.)

• Facilitate client workshops and conversations that drive alignment, momentum, and strategic decisions

• Continuously grow with, as well as upskill, the Business Design craft through knowledge sharing and bringing unique perspectives to the greater IDEO community

Relevant experiences/skills:

Qualified candidates for this role will have:

• A minimum of 4 years of full-time working experience – in a past life, you may have worked in strategy consulting, venture design, product strategy, product management, product innovation, corporate strategy, business insights, business analytics, business planning, go-to market, and/or growth strategy

• Strong business acumen; i.e., broad knowledge or exposure to strategy, marketing, finance, operations, product development, organizational design, etc — MBA beneficial but not required

• Experience in business design, strategy, product management, venture building, or innovation roles

• Ability to creatively problem-solve in a business context, i.e. generate multiple alternative ways to address feasibility, viability, and desirability, including ways that are not obvious

• Comfort working in ambiguous situations with limited direction, independently shaping problem definitions and approaches

• Ability to interpret and communicate complex business ideas to different audiences, through text, visual, and verbal communications

• Experience working across stakeholders and influencing decisions in complex organization

• Track record in making ideas real and tangible, from concept to execution roadmap, as an entrepreneur and/or intrapreneur, and bringing others along with you

• Strength in synthesizing qualitative and quantitative data into clear insights, recommendations and narratives, supporting decision making across options and making potential impact clear

• Strong storytelling and strategic narrative-building skills

Standout candidates for this role will bring:

• Direct experience applying human-centered design approaches, or signals of this skillset

• Leadership in bringing a new product or venture to market (0→1)

• Familiarity with tools (including AI) to accelerate thinking and workflow

• Client centricity…