[Hiring] Senior Futures Design Strategist @Motorola Solutions

Role Description

As a Senior Futures Design Strategist, you’ll help shape Horizon 3 (5–10+ year) product opportunities and make sure they lead somewhere. This role is for someone who can dream and be pragmatic. You’ll make futures tangible through artifacts, interfaces and narratives that let users and leaders step inside them. Then you’ll make them actionable by turning them into value propositions, opportunity briefs and investment choices the business can act on. As the team’s main design-focused individual contributor, you’ll own the bridge between our futures work and the teams who explore and build. That means making sure every promising concept has a credible next step and a clear owner.

Core Responsibilities

• Speculative Prototyping & Design Fiction: Create tangible future-state artifacts (mock interfaces, speculative journey maps, world-building narratives) that let users and stakeholders step into, critique, and pressure-test 5–10+ year concepts before investment is committed.
• Commercial Opportunity Framing: Translate abstract futures into viable business opportunities by defining value propositions, target users, business models, competitive positioning, and the key assumptions that must hold true, along with why it matters to Motorola Solutions now.
• Activation & Handover: Scope Strategic Opportunity Briefs, run activation workshops, and transition validated concepts to downstream R&D, product, and incubation teams, so each promising concept leaves with a well-scoped next step and a clear owner.
• Executive Influence & Delivery: Present visually compelling strategic options, trade-offs, and risks to C-suite and senior leaders, bringing a clear point of view on which futures to invest in, monitor, or set aside.
• Foresight Research & Synthesis: Partner with researchers to ground concepts in human needs and in market and technology context. Contribute to AI-assisted signal scanning and facilitate foresight methods (STEEP, CLA, Delphi) to turn weak signals into design hypotheses.
• Practice Multiplier: Mentor peers, raise the quality of our experiential design, and help show how futures work creates strategic option value across the company.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in design strategy, innovation strategy, speculative design, strategic foresight, or innovation consulting.
• Tangible future artifacts and frameworks grounded in human-centered research, with evidence of how that work moved past the presentation into funded exploration, product roadmaps, pilots, or new ventures.
• Deep expertise in speculative design, design fiction, and scenario building, with exceptional visual craft (Figma, FigJam, physical prototyping, video narrative).
• Working fluency in how businesses create and capture value, including business model design, market and competitive dynamics, and risk/return.
• Practical command of foresight and research methods (scenario planning, backcasting, STEEP, causal layered analysis, Delphi).
• Proven ability to guide R&D, product, and design teams through futures work without direct authority.
• Willingness to travel for in-person research when needed and to collaborate across US and European time zones.

Requirements

• Bachelors degree with 5+ years in UX research or design strategy AND 3+ years in design strategy, speculative design, innovation strategy, or strategic foresight within a product strategy team, consultancy, or incubation setting.
• Travel Requirements: 10-25%
• Relocation Provided: None
• Position Type: Experienced
• Referral Payment Plan: Yes

Benefits

• Incentive Bonus Plans
• Medical, Dental, Vision benefits
• 401K with Company Match
• 10 Paid Holidays
• Generous Paid Time Off Packages
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Paid Parental & Family Leave
• and more!

EEO Statement

Motorola Solutions is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status or any other legally-protected characteristic.

We are proud of our people-first and community-focused culture, empowering every Motorolan to be their most authentic self and to do their best work to deliver on the promise of a safer world. If you’d like to join our team but feel that you don’t quite meet all of the preferred skills, we’d still love to hear why you think you’d be a great addition to our team.

We’re committed to providing an inclusive and accessible recruiting experience for candidates with disabilities, or other physical or mental health conditions. To request an accommodation, please complete this Reasonable Accommodations Form so we can assist you.