A Guide to Hiring Profiles That Don't Fit Standard Roles (Including Mine)
Some of the most difficult roles to hire are not new. They're just hard to classify.
A Hiring Pattern I Keep Seeing
Modern organisations face a structural tension in how they hire.
Services now span digital platforms, physical environments, operational systems, and human behaviour simultaneously. A single initiative may affect how a customer navigates an app, how staff coordinate across a building, and how a policy decision gets translated into a lived experience, all at once.
Hiring structures have not kept pace with this reality. Roles are still defined through familiar categories, even when the work itself has moved beyond them.
The result is a recurring friction point: professionals who operate across transformation, experience, innovation, and product strategy are consistently difficult to place. Not because their capabilities are unclear, but because the classification systems used to evaluate them were built for a different kind of work.
I am often one of those profiles. This article is not a personal introduction. It is a practical guide for recruiters and hiring managers who encounter candidates whose work sits between established categories and who need a clearer lens to evaluate them.
The Classification Problem
Most hiring structures still follow recognisable paths: UX and Design, Product Management, Transformation, Innovation, Architecture, or Operations.
These categories are not wrong. They reflect real disciplines and real functions that organisations genuinely need. The challenge arises when a candidate's contribution cannot be evaluated through a single one of them, and the hiring process has no mechanism for looking between them. The problem is not the path. It is the peripheral vision.
In many engagements, I have been brought in under a specific label, often through experience design or research, only for the scope to expand into questions the original role was never designed to answer:
What is the root cause here, and what is simply a symptom?
Why should this service or product exist at all?
Are the digital and physical journeys connecting, and if so, how and when?
What organisational change is actually required for any of this to be adopted?
At that point, the work shifts. It moves from improving individual touchpoints to shaping how decisions are made across systems. The original title no longer describes what is actually happening.
This is the classification problem. It is not a capability gap. It is a gap between what the work requires and the vocabulary available to hire for it.
What My Work Actually Involves
Most engagements begin with a specific mandate: redesign this, research that, define the experience for this service. I take those briefs seriously. But I cannot execute on them responsibly until I understand what is actually happening beneath them.
The entry point is always diagnosis. There is a prior question that has to be answered before anything can be designed, built, or transformed: what is the real cause here, and what are we treating as the cause that is actually just a symptom?
Getting to that answer requires working across methods deliberately. Quantitative data shows patterns and scale. Qualitative research surfaces the reasoning and experience behind those patterns. Cultural interpretation is what allows both to be read correctly in context, because the same behaviour means different things in different organisational and social environments. The combination is what makes a diagnosis reliable rather than assumed.
Four projects illustrate how this tends to work in practice.
Working with a healthcare holding company, I was brought in to examine patient experience. What the data and fieldwork revealed was that the friction had no single location. It lived in the gap between spatial configuration, staff coordination routines, and service flow — three systems that had never been designed in relation to each other. Before any design recommendations could responsibly be made, that invisible structure had to be mapped and made legible to the people responsible for changing it.
On a banking branch transformation, the original brief was focused on physical layout and service aesthetics. The real question turned out to be whether the spatial design, the service processes, and the digital channels were collectively shaping customer behaviour in the same direction, or working against each other. Answering that required a diagnostic layer the original brief had not anticipated, and that I had to build before execution could begin.
In an innovation environment, the challenge was not idea generation. It was translating an emerging capability into a service model that real institutional stakeholders could understand, adopt, and eventually own. That required reading the organisational culture carefully alongside the technical and strategic content, because adoption logic is never just rational. It is social and contextual.
In a museum and cultural institution context, the work involved understanding how visitors move through, make meaning of, and emotionally experience a space over time. This is not purely a spatial or digital problem. It requires integrating behavioural observation, qualitative narrative, and an understanding of how cultural identity shapes what people expect, notice, and remember. The design implications only become visible once that layer of interpretation is done.
Across all four, the outputs were not primarily artefacts. They were structures the organisations could use to make better decisions:
system-level diagnostics that made hidden misalignments visible
experience and service frameworks that gave multiple teams a shared operating logic
governance models that connected policy intent to lived experience
methods for reading quantitative and qualitative data in cultural context
In each case, the role sat between strategy and execution. Not above execution, and not separate from it. The diagnostic work was the precondition for execution that would actually hold.
The Radar Model
To make this more concrete, I mapped the domains my work consistently operates within across different organisational contexts.
Each axis represents a different hiring lens through which the same capability tends to be interpreted:
Experience Strategy — shaping how services function coherently across touchpoints, channels, and organisational layers.
Transformation — aligning systems, operations, and people during periods of structural change.
Spatial and Visitor Experience — integrating physical environments into service logic, and understanding how space shapes behaviour.
Governance and Policy — structuring decision-making frameworks and aligning institutional intent with operational reality.
Innovation — reframing problems, translating emerging capabilities into adoptable services, and enabling the conditions for change.
Product Strategy — defining what should be built, why it should exist, and what direction it should take before delivery begins.
Organisational Influence — aligning stakeholders, building shared understanding across disciplines, and enabling decisions that hold across teams.
The work itself remains consistent across all of these. What changes is the organisational context it enters through, and therefore the label it receives.
One Capability, Multiple Hiring Contexts
The same work is interpreted differently depending on the industry it enters. The function remains consistent. The organisational lens changes.
| Context | How the work appears |
|---|---|
| Banking and financial services | Experience transformation and service redesign |
| Healthcare | System-level diagnostics and service alignment |
| Public sector and government | Governance, policy frameworks, and beneficiary experience |
| Innovation environments | Concept framing and adoption strategy |
| Product organisations | Product discovery and strategic definition |
| Museums and cultural institutions | Visitor journey strategy and spatial experience integration |
In each of these contexts, the underlying question is the same: what should exist, why does it matter, and how does it need to operate across the systems that deliver it.
Where I Fit … and Where I FIT LESS
This section exists because clarity here is more useful than breadth. A profile that claims to fit everywhere fits nowhere convincingly.
Where I am a strong fit
Experience and Service Transformation
Roles focused on aligning services across channels, teams, and operational layers simultaneously. This includes Experience Strategy Lead, Service Transformation Lead, and CX or Experience Director positions where the challenge is systemic coherence rather than touchpoint optimisation.
The strongest fit is when the organisation knows something is not working but cannot yet see where the misalignment lives.
Product Strategy and Discovery
Roles focused on the upstream questions: what should be built, why it should exist, and what direction it needs to take before a delivery team picks it up. This includes Product Strategy Lead, Product Discovery Lead, and Service or Product Concept Strategist positions.
The work here is definition and direction. It is not backlog ownership, sprint management, or delivery execution. Those are distinct and important functions. They are simply not where this contribution creates the most value.
Innovation Strategy
Roles where the challenge involves reframing a problem, translating an emerging technology or capability into something adoptable, or building the conditions for an organisation to move in a new direction. This includes Innovation Strategy Lead, Future Services Lead, and Innovation Program Strategist positions.
The fit is strongest when the work requires both analytical rigour and the ability to read organisational readiness, not just generate concepts.
Spatial and Visitor Experience
Roles where experience spans physical space, service design, and human behaviour simultaneously. This includes Visitor Experience Strategy, Guest Journey Strategy, and Experience Planning roles in cultural, civic, or hospitality environments.
The specific contribution here is integrating spatial logic with service and behavioural insight, rather than treating them as separate work streams.
Governance, Policy, and Public Services
Roles where the challenge is connecting institutional intent to lived experience, or building decision frameworks that hold across organisational layers. This includes Experience Governance Lead, Service Design in institutional contexts, and Beneficiary Experience Strategy positions.
The fit is strongest when the organisation needs someone who can work fluently across policy language and human-centred practice without losing the thread of either.
Where I am less likely to be the right hire
This is equally important to state clearly.
Delivery-focused Product Manager roles centred on execution tracking, velocity, and sprint coordination are not where this work creates the most value. Neither are UX production roles focused primarily on interface output and component delivery, program management roles organised around reporting cadence, or architectural delivery roles requiring detailed implementation ownership.
This is not a question of capability. It is a question of where the contribution lands. My work operates upstream of execution. It shapes the direction, structure, and decision logic that execution depends on. Roles that begin where that work ends are better served by a different profile.
Why Roles Like This Are Increasing
This is not a niche problem. It is a directional one.
Several structural shifts are converging to create demand for work that sits between established disciplines, and they are not temporary conditions. They are the new operating environment.
Digital transformation has moved beyond screens. It now directly affects physical environments, staff behaviours, operational processes, and the expectations people bring to every interaction with an organisation. A digital decision is rarely only a digital decision anymore.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating this complexity. It introduces new layers of behavioural uncertainty, new questions about trust and transparency, and new gaps between what an organisation intends and what a person actually experiences. Navigating that requires someone who can hold the strategic, operational, and human dimensions together simultaneously.
Institutions are being asked to coordinate across silos they were not designed to bridge. Healthcare systems, government services, cultural organisations, and financial institutions are all facing versions of the same challenge: delivering coherent experiences across environments that were built and managed separately, often for decades.
Experience has stopped being an interface-level concern. It is now organisational. It lives in policy decisions, in spatial configurations, in how teams hand work to each other, in what gets measured and what does not. Improving it requires working at all of those levels, not just the visible ones.
The roles that address this are still being named. Some organisations call it transformation. Others call it experience strategy, service design, or innovation. The titles are inconsistent because the function is still being recognised for what it is.
The need, however, is already visible. And it is growing.
How to Recognise Profiles Like This
This type of profile becomes relevant when the challenge cannot be contained within a single function. Not because the problem is unusually large, but because it sits in the connections between functions rather than inside any one of them.
Consider this profile when you need someone who can:
identify what the real problem is before the work begins, separating root causes from symptoms
connect quantitative and qualitative insight to strategic and organisational decisions
align multiple teams around a shared direction without owning the delivery of any single one
translate systemic complexity into structures that different disciplines can actually use
work fluently across digital, physical, and institutional environments without treating them as separate problems
The signal is usually a brief that keeps expanding. A scope that turns out to be larger than its original frame. A situation where the right next step is not immediately obvious, and where getting it wrong upstream will cost significantly more to correct downstream.
That is where this work begins.
Closing
If your organisation is navigating complex transformation, evolving services, or experience ecosystems that span multiple systems and environments, I am always open to thoughtful conversations.
In some cases, the most effective hire is not a new specialisation. It is a role that allows existing disciplines to work together with clarity, and gives the organisation a way to see the connections it has been missing.
