A Day in the Life of a Strategic Designer
By Estefanía Puigmitjá Martín and Roger Andersson Reimer, with contributions by Clare Goldblatt
Strategic Design is a growing discipline that leverages traditional design principles to solve complex, systemic issues. Strategic designers collaborate with business professionals to innovate within corporations and locate new, unexplored areas of systems that can be used to strengthen product ecosystems and kick-start new businesses. This is a very dynamic position that involves leveraging human-focused approaches to solve any organization’s big problems. Using a designer’s mindset of bringing order to chaos is arguably more effective than calling on conventional consultants and policymakers to foster change. However, many organizations still don’t work with strategic designers, and it might be hard to imagine what a strategic designer’s daily life might entail. We asked Estefanía and Roger to share what their days look like to help demystify how a strategic designer’s typical day might be.
Estefanía Puigmitjá Martín is a Strategic Design Lead @Accenture based in Madrid, Spain
Roger Andersson Reimer is a Principal Strategic Designer @IKEA based in Lund, Sweden
Estefanía Puigmitjá Martín
Estefanía is a Strategic Design Lead at Accenture Song in Madrid. When she’s not delving deep into a company’s problems, you might find her reading a novel or walking her dog around the city.
The following day occurred in September 2022, on a Monday.
MORNING
07:00–08:00
Wake up and Coffee
Every day is a little different for me, but I tend to wake up at 07:00. Then I shower, have a coffee, and look at my emails and social media networks. I subscribe to newsletters like Medium or the New York Times, and I like to read some articles early in the morning to start the day. If something is relevant for my team, I'll mark it and share it with them later. I also read Spanish newspapers to inform me of pertinent news and know what is happening in the country.
08:00–09:00
Commute and Set up the Day
Either I'll go into the office at Accenture Song, or I'll go to my desk in my apartment and start working from home. I like the flexibility of working from home or at the office, but I think it's essential to be in the office since I find it invigorating to be around other people and the team, sharing insights and thoughts.
That Monday, I went to the office since we had team meetings and deep work time with tools only available in the office.
Luckily, the office is only 30 minutes by train, and I like to use the time on the train to look into what the day has to offer me. I schedule reminders in advance and look into all the meetings coming up for the day.
09:00–09:15
Client Check-In
That Monday, my day at the office started with a daily check-in with a client, where we reviewed the project's status and next steps. We are now working for a large international media client in the B2B and B2C space. One of their challenges is to design a new solution that brings value and helps to foster engagement with their current users while attracting younger generations to their products.
It's an exciting project because the problems they're facing are complex. Many solutions may appear to solve this kind of problem. Still, we must develop the winning solution since this project will guide a significant investment for our Client to create their future revenue streams.
As a Strategic Designer, I help design the solution and the implementation roadmap. That means we have to find the best strategy internally and for the market and define our product vision, business case, and technology scenario very concretely. Until that Monday, we did a lot of research, including stakeholder and user interviews and co-creation rumbles. Then we were in the consolidation phase, rationalizing the decisions up to this point.
9:15–10:00
Team Check-In
After the check-in with the Client, I met with the project team, and we organized the day's tasks. Strategic Designers work hand-in-hand with all areas at Accenture since our projects need not only a design perspective, but also business consulting, technology, and operational perspectives.
Not so long ago, it wasn't easy to make people understand that designers go beyond visuals and post-its. Now it is becoming more apparent, and this cultural change brought about by success and trust enriches collaboration and dramatically improves the solutions we provide to our clients, generating more business value for them.
This cultural shift of mixing design with business, technology, and operations is more than working together on many projects--it's about creating a new profile of designers. Some of us have been ramping up our business skills in our team, and four more colleagues will take the d.MBA in the next cohort for being able to include a business perspective when they design.
10:00–14:00
Deep Focus
That day, once we were all aligned on the daily tasks, I took the next several hours to focus on the project taking insights from user interviews, market research, and stakeholder interviews and bringing them all together to sketch a first approach to the future solution.
As I mentioned, we can work at the office or remotely, so we use Notion or Figma to share all these insights on one central board for the team and work together.
AFTERNOON
14:00–15:00
Lunch
Typically, I enjoy going with colleagues for lunch when I'm at the office. It gives us time to socialize while taking a break from work tasks. That Monday, we went to a place called Honest Greens since it's only a 2-minute walk away, and they serve lots of healthy options. Keeping in shape both physically and mentally is another essential aspect of my daily life.
15:00–15:45
Asana
Each team lead has a cell, a cross-functional, mixed design team with different types of designers-from brand to strategy.
That day we had a session we called "Asanas." We used this session to discuss current projects in the cell, highlights, and help points. That day we shared some positive achievements and detected some issues in two of our projects. This is a crucial meeting for us since we have the opportunity to look for some pieces of advice from the rest of the team.
Regarding those two issues mentioned before, they were easy enough to solve during the session without reorganizing the staffing to reallocate people.
My role as a Lead is to moderate and facilitate discussion in these meetings, but I always sit back and allow others to speak more since I want them to reach out to each other to give and take advice which fosters better collaboration and trust.
15:45–19:00
Conceptualization
This block of time was deep-focus work again. The conceptualization phase is my favorite one because it is satisfying to see your ideas and research finally come to fruition. For this project with the media client, we envisioned the final concept, and the solution roadmap with all the insights gathered up to that time. For example, we started by working on the main hypothesis and linking the content in a concept map, which we drew from the user, market, and business insights along with the results of co-creation sessions.
When we launched the conceptualization phase that day, we began with a conceptualization session. We put all our ideas down on an infinite digital whiteboard in the studio to start crafting the future solution. This digital whiteboard is so helpful since all our ideas are immediately digitized, and it's a fun, collaborative way to work together.
EVENING
19:00–24:00
After Work & Bedtime
Some days it gets longer at work, but we try to ensure that it never becomes the norm.
That Monday, I ended my day by going to the gym for one hour. I finally reached home again at 20.30, where I had something for dinner.
I usually go to bed at midnight (at most) and enjoy reading novels before bed. I am reading "The seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo" (100% recommendable). I've discovered it's super important to disconnect from all screens before going to bed in order to have a better rest during the night.
Strategic design defined by Estefanía:
Strategic Design is a practice that aims to solve business challenges by adopting a mindset that integrates human-centricity and business needs.
Strategic designers use a set of methodologies and tools from design, management, and social sciences to generate innovative solutions that are desirable (human), feasible (technology, operations, systems), and viable (business impact, profitability, sustainability), solving the challenges of both individuals and organizations.
Roger Andersson Reimer
Roger Andersson Reimer is a Principal Strategic Designer at IKEA, working in Malmö and based in Lund, Sweden. His role is focused on people-centered exploration, identifying and shaping new opportunities where IKEA can create value for people & planet. When Roger isn’t working, you might find him hanging out with his 4-year-old daughter or talking to people using food and drinks as his medium.
The following day occurred on September 7th, 2022, on a Wednesday.
MORNING
06:30–07:15
Wake Up & Family Time
I’m an early morning person and, luckily, tend to sleep well. When I get up in the morning, I shower, lie on the couch, read the news, and hang out with the family.
07:15–08:15
A Commute with Fresh Air
I mix working from home and the office. On this particular day, I used the commute to get fresh air and some steps, so I walked instead of taking the bus to the station and from the station to the office.
I typically come into the office at around 08:00 AM. It’s a big one with about 2,500 people. We have a great canteen on-site, so I always have my coffee and breakfast there when I arrive.
08:15–09:00
Catching Up with Colleagues & Breakfast
This morning at the canteen, I bumped into a colleague in town visiting from our Amsterdam hub. She was in Malmö to onboard a new starter in Sweden. We’re a distributed team spread across Malmö, Amsterdam, Madrid, Philadelphia, and Shanghai, but we closely collaborate with her and her team reasonably often.
09:00–09:30
Team Ritual
One of our new joiners initiated this new team ritual to create a stronger sense of belonging in the team.
We’re still getting to know each other, and this time around, we enjoyed a casual exercise about guessing music from people’s past. It was a fun surprise to learn we had a few indie kids on the team.
09:30–10:00
Shaping the Retail Experience
We have recently concluded some insights with implications for our retail experience, and I had a scoping chat with some of my colleagues to set up the next steps. This was a quick coaching session, deciding on what direction to go with and what partners to involve in the work ahead.
10:00–11:00
Focus Time
Next, I had some focus time to refine a concept I’ve been working on for a while. We’re exploring a new value space for building stronger relationships with people at a specific life stage. It’s building on top of a needs framework we developed earlier. I’m now deep diving into articulating one of the value propositions and some of the signature moments to create a story around our strategy and the intended customer experience. My job is to make sure we make the value proposition tangible, along with the business rationale of how it would fit into our business strategy and the implications for the organization.
11:00–12:00
Leadership Meeting
We have leadership meetings that happen twice a week. The first slot is on Monday when we deal with operational tasks like budgeting and resourcing. The second meeting is on Wednesday, when we look deeper at prioritized topics and projects across our programs and innovation areas.
It’s meant to help us rise above the chaos and take a step back. We assess where work is at, share important conversations we’re having across the organization, and look at accelerating our visibility and contribution as a team.
The agenda for these meetings tends to be very dynamic, and we might only cover 2-3 topics in one session.
12:00–13:00
Lunch
At lunch, I went back down to the canteen. It was a crowded day, probably because lots of teams had on-site get-togethers that day.
Sometimes I’ll make lunch plans and invite a colleague to eat with me. On this particular day, I hadn’t made any plans, I just bumped into people and said hello while enjoying the salad buffet for lunch.
After lunch, I rushed back to my desk, and sent some emails and slack messages.
AFTERNOON
13:00–15:30
Workshop
I didn’t facilitate this workshop this time but was one of the contributors to a cross-functional team. We dove deep into one of the exploration cases we’re collaborating on, intending to refine one of the identified opportunities in one of our innovation areas.
My role when working with cross-functional peers like business owners, strategy, marketing, and subject matter experts is to reframe conversations to be people-centered and find the fit with our company vision, strategies, and the emerging world around us. Our larger team does a mix of foresight and insights work to enable us to do this. On this particular day, I mainly had to uplift the overall problem statement, reframe it to be genuinely outside-in, and sharpen the case on why the opportunity is attractive for IKEA and why IKEA has a right to play in this space.
15:30–16:15
Quick Catch Up
At 15:30, I had a quick catch-up with my manager and aligned on a specific topic we have been working on. We synced on some of these concepts I’d been working on earlier in the day.
We delivered a north star ambition back in the spring, and the stuff we’re looking at now is a further iteration of this initiative. This project grabbed a lot of interest and questions because it was so successful. The CEO wants to be briefed on this initiative’s updates, so we’ll report them in about one month. My manager and I started to jam on the narrative for this presentation in a month.
16:15–16:45
Soda Break & Pack Up
I went down to the canteen to have a soda and met with some other people, to have a quick chat and say hello. Then I went to answer some final emails and pack up my things. In all, this was a work day full of context switching.
EVENING
16:45–17:45
I left the office and took the train home to Lund, which lies outside Malmö. The train ride is only about 20 minutes from the office. On the way home, I went into the supermarket and bought some butter for dinner since my partner was making mashed potatoes.
17:45–22:00
My daughter’s preschool is about 2 minutes away from my apartment. Sometimes I pick her up, or my partner does. My partner and daughter arrived back at the same time I did, as they’d been out playing in the park.
The three of us then started cooking, and I hung out with my daughter, who started doing arts and crafts. It’s her birthday tomorrow, so we had to prepare some presents and the place for the birthday party next weekend.
We had mashed potatoes and vegetarian sausage for dinner.
22:00–22:30
TV & Bedtime
I have been into watching the drama about WeWork on AppleTV, WeCrashed. It’s been an intriguing revelation on what happened at that company, and I always love the escapism of being pulled into a different world as a viewer.
Then I went to bed at 22:30.
Strategic design defined by Roger:
Strategic Design helps organizations build a collective imagination around new areas of value for people & business. We do this by shaping propositions and business models, their customer experience, and the strategic choices – connecting people’s dreams, needs & emerging behaviors, the forces that change the world around us, and the business drivers & value creation goals.
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