Head of Experience Design

Role Overview

Head of Experience Design at Al Tayer Group. Al Tayer Insignia is a luxury retail company operating across the GCC with boutiques, department stores, and online platforms.

Company Overview

Al Tayer Insignia has partnered with world-leading iconic brands for over 40 years, creating award-winning retail experiences. The company operates a truly seamless omnichannel presence across the GCC, bringing style, innovation, and heritage together. The team is diverse, customer-obsessed, and passionate about creativity and empowering growth.

Role Purpose

Own end-to-end experience design strategy and execution across physical, digital, and phygital touchpoints for Al Tayer Insignia's portfolio. Shape the differentiating value proposition of brands and concepts beyond products, support the Customer Strategy and experiential north star, and reinvent the way the company does retail by building regional and global experiential statements. Translate customer insights, trends, and journey intelligence into strategic, compelling, and innovative design interventions that craft delightful moments, orchestrate seamless experiences, and drive both customer and commercial outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Vision

• Define Al Tayer Insignia's experience design vision and multi-year roadmap, translating Customer Strategy into concrete design priorities across physical, digital, and phygital touchpoints.
• Set the design agenda for reinventing the experiential side of retail formats across all verticals and channels, including Department Stores, online flagships, Amber loyalty programme, and new concepts.
• Bridge CX, UX, and UI design where needed across the portfolio.

Building the Design Practice

• Build the experience design function from scratch, establishing methodology, standards, tools, governance, and talent.
• Deploy Design Thinking methodologies and onboard key stakeholders to the approach.
• Establish a formal and innovative experience design practice and discipline within Al Tayer Insignia.
• Coach on both the craft of experience design and prototyping, as well as strategic and brand-led thinking.
• Drive systematic collaboration with relevant teams within the Experience Design unit.
• Promote knowledge sharing, inspiration, influence, and culture shaping across the organization.

Design & Execution

• Own end-to-end journey mapping and service design across the full customer lifecycle, connecting strategy to CX design, UX, and UI.
• Turn customer intelligence, trends, and journey insights into design interventions that shape differentiation and preference for portfolio brands, the loyalty programme, and customers.
• Design signature moments that balance creative differentiation with commercial impact.
• Enable the reinvention and future proofing of existing key formats across all channels.
• Deploy a customer-centric and brand-centric approach to design, prioritizing empathetic and human-centric experiences that are natively omnichannel and filled with signature moments.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner cross-functionally with brand and vertical stakeholders to align design work to their priorities.
• Collaborate with the Customer Intelligence team on behavioural personas, trends and insights, concept testing, and customer co-creation.
• Work closely with Digital and IT teams to ensure designs are technically feasible and get implemented.
• Engage with store teams, customer care, and other customer-facing roles to design in context with true focus on relevance.
• Act as the experience design authority for the company, effectively partnering with all business verticals and brand stakeholders beyond CX and Marketing functions.
• Influence and inspire stakeholders, ensuring that a culture of experience design emerges beyond the team.

Governance & Improvement

• Govern associated investments, feeding design perspective into business cases and OKRs and paving the way for innovation through experiences.
• Partner with relevant teams to track and continuously improve key journeys, with clear ownership at each stage.
• Work with the Customer Intelligence team to effectively measure key journeys end to end and continuously improve them, ensuring effective ownership.

Qualifications & Experience

• 8–10+ years in experience design or service design, ideally in luxury retail, hospitality, or premium omnichannel environments.
• Retail experience mandatory.
• Proven track record designing and scaling a CX or XD practice.

Skills & Competencies

• Proven fluency in Design Frameworks, Experience Design, and UX Design.
• Strong abilities in bridging business strategy, creative design, trends analysis, brand strategy, and financial outcomes through experience design.
• Outstanding collaboration abilities.
• Ability to operate at strategic level, unlocking key decisions with senior stakeholders while continuously contributing to hands-on craft and guiding the team.
• Proven track record in knowledge sharing, inspiration, influence, and culture shaping.