Experience Strategist

About Us

Crema partners with teams who need to build exceptional digital experiences that move their business forward. Our small, cross-discipline teams combine their sets of diverse skills in custom agile consulting, product management, and design thinking to help individuals and organizations thrive.

We're passionate about what we do and who we do it with. At Crema, we live by our values and are looking for values-aligned teammates to join us in building something special! We're not looking for conformists, we want individuals with diverse perspectives that help shape our company for the better.

While we have an office in Kansas City, we are a "Work from Anywhere" company so this is a remote position available to anyone based in the United States.

The Role

Crema's Experience Strategists clarify context, identify opportunities, & shape strategies that create great experiences throughout the product/service lifecycle. Applying tools & techniques from areas like research, strategy, design, consulting, business, and systems thinking, they gather, synthesize, and prioritize information so that teams can make good decisions about the next stage of work. This isn't research for its own sake or moonshot strategy; this is practical, relevant, and inspiring work that empowers meaningful outcomes.

What You'll Do

As part of a cross-functional set of collaborators, you'll guide teams through the mess & ambiguity of high-level, early stage questions across a broad spectrum of challenges to shape meaningful paths forward.

Initially, you'll shape & plan the most appropriate approach to meeting the needs & goals of the initiative. Typically, you'll lead, organize, & facilitate a variety of methods: client-facing workshops, interviews, whiteboard sessions, desk research, and more. Working alongside a wide variety of collaborators, you'll draw out the best of what they know and then create a holistic perspective that summarizes the problems & opportunities at hand.

This might look like a customer journey map, service blueprint, business model, or other artifact(s) that codify insights and inspires brilliant experiences. Of course, these documents aren't just for you. They're designed to spur collaboration among executives, delivery teams, & end users and focus attention on the areas of greatest impact.

As opportunities take shape, you'll help identify pathways for success and potential risks that come along with them; critical assessment of these ecosystems, ideas, and organizations is crucial. This will include generating concepts for ideas ranging from known & simple to difficult & expansive, bringing the customer's journey together with healthy businesses and practical applications to create meaningful, holistic solutions. You'll navigate the tensions between what is, what could be, and what should be, and then design experiments to validate these ideas. Keeping an eye on what's next, you'll provide recommendations that are rooted in the findings above so that the team can move forward with confidence.

Requirements

About You

You might have a background in design, business, technology, or product, but you're known for your curiosity, resourcefulness, optimism, and collaboration. As a natural lateral thinker, you're able to see connections and create constellations between related and non-obvious aspects of a situation.

With a solid understanding of common design thinking, research, & validation methodologies, you're able to synthesize insights from those activities. You know when to explore a landscape and imagine possibilities beyond the obvious, but also how to converge on significant points of leverage. You get excited about bringing clarity to complex situations, and you get even more exited about sharing that context & coherence with others in a way that empowers them to take the work to the next level.

You're more likely to be the guide than the hero. There are highly collaborative and independent aspects to this work, and you're comfortable in both - even if just for a short time. You're comfortable communicating with all levels of an organization and you can traverse the concrete and abstract aspects of a problem space.

From a craft perspective, you're always improving what you do, both by deepening your expertise in the basics, and finding - or creating! - new tools that add to the Experience Strategy body of work.

We believe in continuous feedback at Crema-you must be open to giving and receiving feedback-and you'll receive some training when you join the team. This role is always learning, so a teachable spirit is important to your success and Crema's as a whole.

As a remote-first company, we are looking for someone that thrives in an asynchronous setting and can balance intentional collaboration and communication with the ability to be self-driven and work independently.

Hiring Process

We're intentional with our hiring process because we want to find the right candidate for the role. Our overall hiring process takes about 4-8 weeks from the time you are contacted for your first interview. You'll observe a high level of transparency during the interview process to ensure a good match. We'll do our best to answer all of your questions and provide candid feedback. There is more information on our hiring principles and more on our careers page.

Our process will look a little like this:

1. Submit your application: we want to hear from you and how you align with our values.
2. Phone Screen: if your application is selected, a member of our Ops team will reach out and schedule a 30-minute call to learn more about you and give you a chance to ask us questions.
3. Interview with leadership: the next step is an hour-long call with Crema's VP of Strategy, Tyler Hilker. They will take this time to understand your skills and experience. Be prepared with any questions about the company, role, or other aspects of Crema.
4. Interview with team members: we're a very collaborative company, and we want the team you'll be working with to have a chance to get to know you more and how they may work with you. You'll meet with Tyler and members of a product team for an hour-long interview.
5. Decision: after the team members deliberate, we will inform you of the final decision. Whether or not you are offered a position, you will be notified as soon as possible.

Note: Industry research shows that individuals in traditionally underrepresented groups generally don't apply to jobs unless they check all the boxes for the role. If you feel strongly that you have what it takes for this role but don't check 100% of the boxes-that's okay-we encourage you to apply anyway and highlight what you can bring to the table.

Benefits

We are a remote-first company with a diverse group of folks all over the United States, working towards our purpose of making lives better through design, technology, and culture. Our results based work culture allows you the flexibility you need to work your best, including taking time to rest, play and restore with unlimited PTO.

We're continually evolving our employee benefits & perks to stay competitive and support our employees fairly. These currently include:

• $500 home office budget
• Parental & medical Leave (12 weeks for primary, 4 weeks for secondary)
• 75% paid health insurance benefits, along with a health savings account
• Free short term disability & group term life insurance
• 401(k) and Roth(k) plans with company matching up to 4%
• Annual cash profit-sharing bonus opportunity
• Lead generation & employee referral bonuses
• $60 Phone & $50 fitness monthly stipends
• Dedicated innovation and learning days every other Friday
• Annual KC Week meetup
• Community volunteer opportunities

For this role, the salary range is $102,000 to $125,400. Our salary benchmark is based on companies with 51 to 250 employees, within the software industry, using the target percentile of 50% of market data. This data comes from a third-party service and we use this data for everyone no matter where you live in the US.