Vice President, Customer Experience + Innovation

CORE WORK ACTIVITIES

• Lead Innovation Insights, Foresight & Opportunity Framing
• Establish and lead Marriott’s innovation capability for customer research, observational insights, trend and foresight analysis, and signal spotting.
• Conduct competitive and analogous industry scans and explore emerging technologies to identify disruption risks and growth opportunities.
• Synthesize insights into clear problem statements and whitespace opportunity areas that inform experience design, innovation priorities, and investment decisions.
• Serve as a trusted thought partner to executive leadership on emerging customer needs, industry shifts, and future-back opportunities.

• Lead Customer Experience Design & Journey Management
• Translate insights and opportunity areas into experience strategies, service models, and design concepts across physical, digital, and experiential touchpoints.
• Lead enterprise journey mapping, service design, and experience definition efforts.
• Oversee concept ideation, synthesis, and visualization, ensuring experiences reflect Marriott’s brand promise and differentiation.
• Guide concept validation across desirability, feasibility, and viability.
• Partner with Brand, Digital, Operations, Technology and other disciplines to integrate experience improvements at scale.

• Orchestrate Enterprise Innovation Initiatives
• Lead end-to-end enterprise innovation from portfolio prioritization to experimentation to pilot to scale.
• Orchestrate Marriott’s product innovation agenda, ensuring innovation efforts across functions are aligned, prioritized, and focused on the highest-value opportunities.
• Lead the Innovation Lab as an enterprise experimentation and learning platform, enabling rapid prototyping, testing, and validation.
• Define and oversee structured approaches to:
• Prototyping and testing
• Pilot design and in-market experimentation
• Learning agendas and performance measurement

• Build and Manage External Ecosystems & Partnerships
• Develop, structure and manage strategic partnerships that accelerate learning, experimentation, and scale.
• Represent Marriott externally as a leader in experience design and innovation.
• Leverage startup scouting and vetting aligned to defined opportunity spaces.

• Enable Innovation Capability Across the Enterprise
• Lead innovation workshops, design sprints, and structured problem-framing sessions for senior teams.
• Build innovation and design thinking capability through training, tools, and shared frameworks.
• Establish common language, methodologies, and standards that enable consistent innovation practices across the organization.
• Contribute to internal and external innovation thought leadership.

Leadership Development, Culture & Team Excellence

• Inspire and lead a high-performing, globally connected team that embodies Marriott’s values and champions cross-continent collaboration.
• Provide day-to-day oversight for shared product teams and cross-functional working groups to deliver global priorities.
• Develop and mentor brand leaders, building a world-class organization recognized for creativity, commercial impact, and strategic excellence.
• Foster an inclusive, empowering culture that rewards innovation, agility, and accountability.
• Shape the next chapter of Select & Midscale brand leadership at Marriott through vision, influence, and enterprise partnership.