Senior Business Designer

The posting, as IDEO wrote it

SF IDEO Senior BxD 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.

The role

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.

Why is this role important for IDEO’s work?

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.

Once here you will

• 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 s

[…]
laborate 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

Payscale & Benefits

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

Commitment to Diversity

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.