Senior Business 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.

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. 

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.

• 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

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 (direct experience or signals of this skillset)
• Experience with venture building, incubation, innovation labs or product/service development
• Experience in relevant industries (financial services, healthcare, technology, manufacturing), with an understanding of complex environments such as regulation, risk, and product innovation 

IDEO Designers are people who:

• Lead with curiosity and optimism
• Hold space for authenticity and psychological safety
• Embrace ambiguity (and still ship)
• Collaborate generously across disciplines
• Learn from failure and iterate forward
• Take ownership and make others successful

IDEO is a place where you can solve diverse, complex challenges for our clients and their organizations, alongside thoughtful, intelligent individuals who lead with curiosity, empathy, and humility. We intentionally craft moments that allow our community to pause, create, and connect. We encourage our community to bring their whole selves to work, respect the need for work-life balance, and allow for autonomy in the design process and your career.

As a Senior Business Designer in San Francisco, we provide the opportunity for you to:

• Work on breakthrough products, ventures (0→1) and strategies across industries like health, financial services, and technology
• Collaborate with a studio of creative, curious, and deeply thoughtful people who challenge and inspire one another
• Contribute to a portfolio deeply rooted in real-world, applied innovation with Midwestern makers, healthcare leaders, financial institutions, and digital product organizations
• Shape end-to-end innovation—from early insight to market activation
• Grow your craft within deeply multidisciplinary teams while building confidence and leadership in client-facing work

IDEO is committed to paying its employees equitably, regardless of gender identity or race/ethnicity/cultural identity. We support the holistic well-being of our community by providing a thoughtfully designed benefits package.

The salary range for this role is $100,000-120,000 USD. This range is influenced by a wide range of factors considered in compensation decisions at IDEO. This includes, but is not limited to: skills, industry knowledge, and experience. Final offers may vary from the amount listed based on geography, candidate experience & expertise, and other factors.

In addition to base compensation, IDEO offers a rich benefits package including the following:

Health Benefits: Vision, Dental, Healthcare

Financial Benefits: 401K matching

Family & Caregiving: Parental Leave, Adoption Assistance, Fertility Assistance, Transgender Medical Assistance, Breastmilk shipment, Back-up/Dependent Care, Pet Insurance

Other Benefits: Flexible Work, Flexible Time Off, Paid Holidays, Annual Education Stipend, Home Office Stipend

At IDEO, we are committed to the work of advancing diversity, equity and inclusion within our organization and in the world. Our purpose of having disproportionate, world-changing impact through design is directly connected to our ability to bring many different perspectives to the table. This applies to our candidates, the people we hire, the clients and customers we serve, and the communities we learn from in our research.