CX Designer

3333 - Associate Director, CX Designer - Manchester

Role Summary and Impact

Associate Director, CX Designer

Working collaboratively with designers, developers and other digital professionals within a product team, you’ll shape and deliver world-class customer experiences across products and services — meeting the needs of real people while creating commercially successful outcomes for our clients.

At Principal level, your focus shifts from leading delivery to raising the quality bar. You’ll partner with senior client stakeholders to establish a shared CX vision, define the right programme of work, and ensure the work is delivered to exceptional standards of craft, accessibility, and measurable impact.

You’ll still roll your sleeves up, but you’ll also act as a force multiplier: setting direction, improving practice, strengthening collaboration, and ensuring teams consistently make better decisions through evidence, insight, and high-quality design thinking.

• Quality leadership – set and uphold high standards for CX thinking, service design, interaction design and accessibility across teams and projects.
• Vision & strategy – build strong senior client relationships by establishing a shared vision for customer experience, and ensuring work progresses against it.
• Process design – design the right programme of work for each challenge, ensuring it can be delivered within a reasonable budget, timeframe and team shape.
• Service & journey ownership – ensure the experience works end-to-end across touchpoints (digital and non-digital), aligning customer needs, operational realities, and business objectives.
• Evidence-led decision making – ensure teams use research, analytics, experimentation and service signals to make confident recommendations and prioritise effectively.
• Communication & storytelling – explain clearly how the programme of work addresses strategic challenges; present recommendations persuasively to senior stakeholders.
• Collaboration – create an environment where collaboration is expected; strengthen ways of working between design, engineering, product and client stakeholders.
• Design systems & scale – demonstrate how design systems enable teams to spend more time innovating; improve patterns, guidance and governance as needed.
• Prototyping for decisions – frame prototypes as decision tools; help clients and teams choose the right fidelity and artefacts to reduce risk and increase learning.
• Mentoring & capability building – coach and develop designers (including Leads) through critique, feedback and shared practice; improve creative capability across teams.
• Client-centric & commercial – maintain trusted client relationships and contribute to new business development, pitches and scoping by shaping credible programmes and outcomes.

Skills and Experience

As an Associate Director, CX Designer, you will be able to draw upon extensive experience shaping programmes of work across multiple clients, raising the standard of delivery, and influencing senior stakeholders through clear vision, evidence, and craft.

Essential

• Establish shared CX vision and principles with senior stakeholders and translate these into a coherent programme of work.
• Design and run end-to-end CX/service design activity (journeys, blueprints, operating constraints, cross-channel behaviours).
• Select and oversee appropriate research and testing approaches; ensure methods and outputs meet a high standard and underpin decision making.
• Ensure insights are usable: translate research into clear narratives, prioritised opportunities, and artefacts that guide delivery.
• Define, assess and improve key customer journeys and service moments (including friction, conversion, onboarding, usage and support).
• Guide teams on IA, navigation, information structure and content/interaction behaviours that support customer goals and business outcomes.
• Use experimentation and measurement to de-risk decisions; articulate what success looks like and how to prove it.
• Lead design critique and peer review across projects to improve usability, accessibility, and commercial impact.
• Partner effectively with engineering and product leadership to shape feasible solutions and delivery plans.
• Improve design system usage and evolution to enable consistency at scale and faster innovation.
• Present confidently to senior clients: communicate trade-offs, rationale, and why the proposed programme will address strategic challenges.
• Strong working knowledge of modern product management and development practices.

Desirable

• Brief and direct external partners (e.g., CX, content, motion, research specialists) to deliver larger and more complex projects.
• Help clarify brand personality and create tangible assets that guide team decisions (tone, visual language, service behaviours).
• Strong experience designing accessibility into services and helping clients prioritise accessibility within delivery constraints.

Leadership

• Self-leadership – be responsible and accountable for your own actions and growth; model curiosity, rigour and integrity.
• Quality & standards – ensure highest standards are met and actively improved across product teams; raise expectations through critique and guidance.
• Programme ownership – design the right process for clients that can be delivered within a reasonable budget; adapt plans responsibly as context changes.
• Strategic influence – build senior client relationships by establishing a shared vision for CX; influence decisions through evidence and clear storytelling.
• Collaboration culture – create an environment where collaboration is expected; improve routines and ways of working across disciplines.
• Creative capability – help teams understand and improve their creative capability through facilitation, coaching and effective decision frameworks.
• Customer-centred business impact – articulate how improvements to business processes and service operations lead to better customer outcomes.
• People – line management and coaching of designers (including Leads), supporting progression, performance and professional development.
• Practice leadership – contribute to evolving agency standards, templates, and best practice across CX/service design, research and accessibility.

Life at WPP Media & Benefits

Our passion for shaping the next era of media is powered by our commitment to Be Extraordinary, investing in our employees to inspire transformational creativity. We also Lead Optimistically, firmly believing in and Championing Growth and Development for every individual. This commitment allows WPP Media employees to leverage the extensive global WPP Media & WPP networks to pursue their passions, build vital professional connections, and learn at the cutting edge of marketing and advertising.

We Create an Open environment built on trust and respect, where everyone feels they belong and has opportunities to progress. This inclusive culture is fostered through a variety of employee resource groups and frequent in-office events showcasing team wins, sharing thought leadership, and celebrating holidays and milestone events. Our comprehensive benefits package reflects this commitment, including competitive medical, group retirement plans, vision, and dental insurance, significant paid time off, preferential partner discounts, and employee mental health awareness days.

WPP Media is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to characteristics. We believe the best work happens when we're together, fostering creativity, collaboration, and connection in this open and supportive environment. That's why we’ve adopted a hybrid approach, with teams in the office around four days a week. If you require accommodations or flexibility, please discuss this with the hiring team during the interview process. Please note that while our philosophy is the same across WPP, benefits may vary by office/country.

Please note this is a UK based role and requires individuals to have the right to work in this location

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While we appreciate all applications received, only those candidates selected for an interview will be contacted.