Senior Design Strategist

Normative; Toronto; Remote; CAD 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative design consulting firm is seeking a Senior Design Strategist to lead strategy engagements and transform complex insights into actionable strategies. This remote role involves collaboration with diverse teams and clients to tackle challenges and drive impact. Candidates should have extensive experience in strategy and service design, with strong communication skills and the ability to navigate ambiguous environments. The firm values ownership, innovation, and continuous learning.

Benefits

Flexible working hours

Professional development opportunities

Commitment to diversity and inclusion

Qualifications

• 4–7 years of experience in strategy or adjacent domains.
• Demonstrated expertise in framing challenges and leading research.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous and complex domains.

Responsibilities

• Design and lead strategic activities including stakeholder research.
• Collaborate with clients to align goals and shape strategies.
• Translate insights into structured opportunities and deliverables.

Skills

Experience in strategy, innovation, service design

Designing clear strategic pathways

Strong visual and written communication skills

Facilitating strategic sessions

Job description

Welcome to Normative

At Normative, we are committed to solving valuable problems through human-centered design consulting. Our team operates at the intersection of strategy, product design, and technology, helping organizations navigate complexity and drive meaningful innovation.

We believe that exceptional design comes from true partnerships, where collaboration is built on transparency, trust, and shared ownership. Our expertise in specialized problem-solving enables us to tackle hard challenges, leveraging deep domain knowledge and a user-first mindset.

If you thrive in ambiguous and complex environments, seek to design for real impact, and believe in the power of collaboration and innovation, Normative is the right place for you.

About This Role

We’re seeking a Senior Design Strategist to join our growing team. You will lead and contribute to strategy engagements across multiple client projects, helping organizations uncover opportunities, define approaches, and translate ideas into actionable pathways forward.

You’ll collaborate closely with designers, researchers, and technologists to bring insight, foresight, and strategic thinking into every phase of work. You are adept at making sense of complexity, facilitating alignment, and developing compelling strategies that guide implementation.

Experience working in agency or consultancy settings is required. Experience in health or pharmaceutical sectors is a strong asset.

Work Eligibility & Location

Normative is a fully remote team and culture. This role requires candidates to be located and eligible to work in Canada with the ability to travel for work within North America and the EU (up to 25 % of the time). As a remote team who values flexibility, our core working hours are 10:00 am - 4:00pm EST.

What you’ll do

• Design and lead strategic activities, including stakeholder research, industry trend analysis, service and business model exploration, and hypothesis-driven validation.
• Collaborate with clients to uncover challenges, align goals, and shape product, service, and business model strategies.
• Design and facilitate co-design workshops and collaborative sessions with clients and stakeholders.
• Translate insights and ambiguity into structured opportunities, clearly defined paths forward, and compelling deliverables.
• Work across disciplines to integrate strategy into service design, UX, product development, and implementation.
• Develop visual and written strategic artifacts including frameworks, narratives, roadmaps and models that inform decisions and guide teams.
• Contribute to the development and evolution of Normative’s strategic methods, approaches, and points of view.

What you’ll bring

• 4–7 years of experience in strategy, innovation, service design, or adjacent domains, including experience delivering this work in agency or consultancy environments.
• Demonstrated expertise in framing challenges, leading research and synthesis, and designing clear strategic pathways.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous, complex, or highly regulated domains.
• Experience facilitating strategic sessions and communicating direction to executive audiences.
• Familiarity with business model design, service blueprints, and systems mapping.
• Strong visual and written communication skills, including experience creating presentations and strategic artifacts.
• Experience in health, pharma or other regulated industries.
• Ability to work autonomously while contributing to collaborative teams.

Working at Normative:

At Normative, we offer a place where curious, driven people can do the best work of their careers in an environment built for autonomy, mastery, and impact. We are a fully remote, highly collaborative team, designed to support independent thinkers who thrive in complexity, ambiguity, and high-accountability environments.

We take on hard problems that matter, spanning strategy, UX, service design, and technology. You won’t just execute - you’ll shape solutions, drive impact, and push boundaries.

We operate with high trust and high accountability. You own your work, manage your time, and contribute at a high level - without micromanagement. We stay connected through deliberate collaboration, a well-defined organizational cadence, and shared rituals.

We expect ownership, directness, and bravery, but we also value introspection, creativity, and a positive mindset.

We push for excellence while fostering continuous learning and growth.

We invest in our team with fair, clearly defined salary ranges. The expected base salary range for a new hire in this role is listed above. The annual base salary offered is determined by each candidate’s relevant knowledge, skills, education, training and experience. It is aligned to ensure both internal and external competitiveness using market data for the geographic location and industry.We offer meaningful career growth opportunities, and a commitment to well-being. We support professional development, sustainable ways of working, and long-term success - for both our people and our company.

At Normative, we aim to foster an environment where everyone feels included and valued. This is demonstrated in our values, how we treat one another and our hiring practices. Diversity, inclusion, and belonging are core to our daily work. We strongly encourage applications from Indigenous peoples, racialized people, people with disabilities, gender and sexually diverse communities, and people with intersectional identities. If you require any type of accommodation throughout the recruitment process, please indicate this on your application, and we’ll work to meet your needs. For further questions on accessibility, reach out to us at [e-mail].