VP, Experience

About the role

The role is responsible for leading and developing an elite, future-ready team through mentorship, smart hiring, and clear standards. Key responsibilities include team leadership, strategic hiring, targeted upskilling, performance tracking, AI & process transformation, excellence & innovation, business outcomes & accountability, thought leadership & strategy, business development & client partnership.

Responsibilities

• Build an elite, future-ready team through mentorship, smart hiring, and clear standards.
• Develop Senior Leaders: Direct and develop the department’s senior leaders, building their capacity to coach, set standards, and drive performance across their respective teams.
• Cultivate High-Performance Culture: Foster a culture that values both craftsmanship and velocity - one where practitioners hold themselves to a high bar, push creative boundaries, collaborate fluidly, and engage clients with confidence and authority.
• Strategic Hiring: Champion intentional hiring that strengthens the team's depth, diversity of thinking, and Agentic fluency, identifying and closing capability gaps proactively.
• Targeted Upskilling: Partner with People Leaders to commission targeted training programs, with immediate priority areas including Accessibility, Annotations, Component Libraries, and Agentic AI literacy.
• Performance Tracking: Partner with the PMO and POPS to establish meaningful performance metrics that track individual and team contributions, creating clear paths for recognition, development, and remediation.
• Ai & Process Transformation: Define the ongoing evolution of the Experience function in the age of Agentic AI, guide capability audits, and execute plans to close gaps with measurable improvements in usage, certification, and client application.
• Workflow Automation: Direct Experience Design and Product Leaders to evaluate day-to-day tools and workflows, identifying automation opportunities and eliminating low-value effort.
• Standardize Frameworks: Establish standardized processes and refined deliverable frameworks for repeatable client needs.
• Knowledge Sharing: Feed updates back to the overarching delivery process, ensuring Experience’s contributions remain accurate, current, and operationally useful as practices evolve.
• Excellence & Innovation: Drive the adoption of templates and tooling such as Claude Design to enable more consistent, higher-quality outputs at scale across all client deliverables, pitch materials, and internal documentation.
• Waste Reduction: Drive the Product team to eliminate upfront planning pain points through cross-checks that ensure complete discovery, requirements integrity, protected margins, and solutions that balance analytical rigour with innovation.
• Award-Worthy Work: Pursue industry-recognized work as a leading indicator that Apply's Experience function is producing ACx work that moves people and businesses.
• Business Outcomes & Accountability: Own the Experience function's budget, utilization, and financial contribution to the organization, set aggressive targets, monitor performance, and hold the team accountable.
• Data-Driven Performance: Use operational performance data to drive decisions regarding targeted training, process redesign, or adjustments to how services are sold.
• Thought Leadership & Strategy: Advance Apply’s ACx vision internally, with clients, and in the market, champion the ACx Vision, surface emerging patterns, and ensure the Experience function’s perspective is shaping — not just responding to — Apply’s strategic direction.
• External Market Presence: Represent Apply’s ACx perspective at industry events, in published content, and in peer forums, building Apply’s reputation as a firm that doesn’t just follow the shift to agentic AI but helps define what great looks like within it.
• Client-Facing Content & Narrative Contribution: Partner with Marketing and Growth to translate the team’s best work and thinking into case studies, frameworks, and POVs that build Apply’s credibility in the ACx space, bringing a current, well-reasoned point of view into senior client conversations.
• Business Development & Client Partnership: Act as the senior face of Experience: internally, with clients, and in new business, serving as a trusted advisor to Apply's senior leadership and a credible voice externally on experience quality, product strategy, team capability, and where agentic AI is reshaping the competitive landscape.
• Serve as a strategic partner who brings depth, credibility, and continuity to complex brand and product conversations, co-own senior client relationships alongside Client Services, and act as a partner to Growth teams on pitches, helping scope and price Experience and Product services, and identifying opportunities to develop new service offerings.
• Lead data-dependent commercial reviews of how services are scoped to identify where the team is underestimating effort, partner with Growth, Technology (including QA), and Project Management to improve cross-functional workflows, refine estimation standards, and build infrastructure to compare estimates against actuals, and build and maintain briefing guides and enablement materials that allow Growth teams to scope and close Experience and Product work with greater accuracy and confidence.

Requirements

Experience & Leadership: 12+ years in UX, product management, and experience design disciplines, with significant time spent in a senior leadership role at a digital consultancy, agency, or product-led organization. 5+ years leading and developing multi-disciplinary teams of 15+ people, spanning both creative and product functions. Demonstrated track record of practice transformation, building processes, standards, and cultures that measurably improve both output quality and team health. Track record of leading complex, large-scale brand, experience, and technology projects for enterprise and brand-name clients. Proven experience managing and developing senior leaders and strong principal contributors.

Qualifications

• Commercial & Strategic Acumen: Proven ability to own senior client relationships, building trust, navigating complexity, and expanding engagements over time. Experience actively contributing to business development (pitching, scoping, and pricing experience/product services in a consulting context).
• Strong financial literacy: Comfortable with budget ownership, utilization modeling, margin analysis, and pricing strategy. Experience identifying under-monetized services or developing entirely new products and services.
• Technology & AI Fluency: Demonstrated ability to lead teams through technology transitions with clarity, purpose, and genuine enthusiasm. Experience with Agentic AI tools and workflows, or a well-documented history of rapidly mastering and applying emerging technologies in a professional context. A credible, current point of view on how Agentic AI changes the practice of experience design, product strategy, and the economics of delivery.
• Communication & Ways of Working: Exceptional communicator: Equally effective presenting to a C-suite executive, coaching a junior designer, or navigating a difficult cross-functional conversation. A leadership style that combines high standards with genuine investment in people's growth (demanding but developmental). Comfortable operating in ambiguity and under pressure; able to create structure where none exists. Deep familiarity with Agile and iterative delivery models, and experience partnering with PMO functions to optimize tracking.
• Nice to Have: Familiarity with agentic delivery methodology, or experience in a similar consulting environment. I.e. Experience or familiarity with BMAD methodology or similar AI-augmented product discovery and requirements frameworks. Depth in one or more of: standard product management practices or design system practices.