Customer Experience Strategist

Journey Ownership & Strategy

Serve as the journey owner and subject matter expert for a defined customer, retailer, or coworker journey. Develop and maintain a journey roadmap that identifies key opportunities, pain points, and strategic priorities. Translate customer insights, feedback, and data into actionable improvements and initiatives. Partner with Design, Product, Marketing, and Operations to align on shared outcomes and execution.

Duties And Responsibilities

• Lead journey mapping and opportunity framing workshops to uncover moments that matter.
• Apply design thinking and customer empathy to reimagine processes, communications, and interactions.
• Define success metrics and use data to measure and improve the experience over time.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to pilot, test, and scale experience enhancements.
• Bring together cross-functional stakeholders to align on priorities and co-own outcomes.
• Partner with the Growth Office, VOC, and Analytics teams to ensure insights inform decision-making.
• Influence journey-related technology and data priorities that enable personalization and consistency.
• Communicate progress and insights to leadership through clear storytelling and visualization.
• Champion a culture of experimentation, learning, and continuous improvement across journey teams.
• Identify opportunities for automation, simplification, and innovation within assigned journeys.

Skills And Qualifications

• 5–8 years of experience in customer experience, service design, digital strategy, or product management.
• Proven success owning and improving end-to-end journeys that deliver measurable impact.
• Strong understanding of journey mapping, design thinking, and human-centered design.
• Excellent facilitation and collaboration skills; able to influence across diverse functions and levels.
• Analytical mindset with the ability to connect qualitative insights and quantitative data.
• Strong presentation and storytelling skills with executive-level polish.
• Experience in fintech, retail, or customer-facing service industries preferred.
• Passion for customers, empathy-driven innovation, and building experiences that matter.
• Must be available to work on-site at Upbound’s Plano, TX headquarters.

Job Overview

The Customer Experience Strategist plays a central role in designing, optimizing, and elevating critical experiences across Upbound’s ecosystem. Reporting to the Senior Director of Customer Experience Strategy, this role serves as the subject matter expert and owner of a specific journey domain — whether customer, retailer, or coworker — and is accountable for identifying opportunities, leading roadmaps, and collaborating across journey domains to deliver experiences that drive measurable business and customer value. The ideal candidate combines strategic thinking with empathy, design thinking principles, and a passion for understanding people — transforming insights into action to make every interaction with Upbound more meaningful, connected, and human. This is a full-time, on-site position based at Upbound’s Plano, TX headquarters.