Strategic Designer

Company Description

Are you ready to be a big part of something big?

CAR Group has been driving innovation and growth since the 1990s. Collectively, our world leading marketplaces bring together deep expertise powered by a talented team, data, and technology across Oceania, Asia and The Americas.

We deliver world leading technology and advertising solutions designed to make buying and selling a great experience and are the parent company of wholly owned digital marketplaces in Australia (carsales), South Korea (Encar), the United States (Trader Interactive) and Chile (chileautos), in addition to being a majority shareholder of webmotors in Brazil.

With a vision to be the global leader in online vehicle marketplaces, we’re transforming how people buy and sell across the world. We discover new ideas and bring them to life. We continue to grow, and we continue to evolve - and we’re committed to taking innovative steps to get there.

When it comes to your career, we want to offer meaningful opportunities that empower you to make a lasting impact. But for that to happen, we strive to feel small - small enough to stay agile, learn across teams, and connect authentically with each other.

This role sits in our NEXT division which is focussed on future innovation opportunities and developing new products to better serve our users across our global marketplaces. NEXT is a small team of entrepreneurs exploring high-potential, unsolved problems with a start-up mindset and pace.

We embrace hybrid working - combining the flexibility of remote work with the energy and connection of in-person collaboration. We champion flexibility and offer a range of policies and leave options to support your wellbeing.

What’s on offer

• Recognition as one of Australia’s Best Workplaces™ by Great Place to Work®, a Family Friendly Workplace, a WORK180 endorsed employer.
• A highly engaged, collaborative team where you’ll learn from exceptional talent.
• 24 weeks paid parental leave for primary caregivers, four weeks for secondary caregivers, and six weeks paid gender-affirming care leave.
• Regular hackathons, continuous learning opportunities, and wellbeing initiatives that support your mental, emotional, and physical health.

Job Description

What you’ll be doing

As a Strategic Designer, you'll help NEXT identify and explore the opportunities that will shape the future of CAR Group. You'll lead customer journey work to uncover unmet needs and opportunity areas, then work alongside a Senior Product Manager to turn priority opportunities into tangible concepts, prototypes and experiments. Working closely with the Head of Strategic Design and cross-functional teams, you'll bring together customer research, market evidence and creative problem-solving to inform which big bets we pursue and how they could come to life. 

• Lead customer journey and strategic discovery work across CAR Group’s marketplaces, combining customer research, behavioural data, market insight and existing knowledge. 
• Translate complex journeys and unmet needs into clear opportunity areas, recommendations and strategic artefacts that teams can act on. 
• Lead priority discovery workstreams from problem framing and hypothesis development through concepting, prototyping, experimentation and testing. 
• Design lean experiments that assess customer desirability, business viability, technical and operational feasibility, strategic fit and potential to scale. 
• Partner with product, technology, data, commercial, operations and regional teams, facilitating workshops and co-creation to build alignment and momentum. 
• Synthesise evidence into compelling recommendations, investment cases and pitches, helping determine whether opportunities should progress, pivot, pause or stop. 
• Use AI-enabled research, synthesis and prototyping tools to improve the speed and quality of discovery while applying sound judgement to outputs. 

Qualifications

What we’re looking for

• Experience in strategic design, service design, customer experience, product design or a related discipline, ideally working across complex end-to-end journeys. 
• Experience navigating ambiguous, early-stage opportunities and taking work from research and problem framing through to concepts, prototypes, experiments or recommendations. 
• Strong research and synthesis skills, with the ability to combine qualitative, quantitative and market evidence into practical insights. 
• Hands-on capability in journey mapping, service blueprinting, concept development and prototyping. 
• Strategic and commercial curiosity, with the ability to consider customer value, business impact, feasibility and scale. 
• Strong collaboration, facilitation and storytelling skills, with confidence using modern research, mapping, prototyping and AI-enabled tools. 
• Marketplace, platform or multi-sided business experience is a plus; automotive or mobility experience is welcome but not essential. 

We know not everyone will meet every requirement, and that's okay. If you're excited about the role and believe you can make a difference, we'd love to hear from you. 

Additional Information

A few other things we want you to know...

• As an equal opportunity employer, CAR Group welcomes applications from individuals of all backgrounds, identities, abilities, and life experiences. We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels valued and supported.
• If you have a disability or require adjustments to participate fully in the recruitment process, please let us know—we’re here to support you.
• We understand the importance of work-life balance and offer flexible working arrangements, including part-time options. If you’d like to explore this, just ask during the process.
• We’re also a proud Circle Back Initiative employer, which means we commit to responding to every applicant.
• Successful candidates joining the CAR Group team will need to complete a National Police Record check and must have full-time Australian working rights.

So come and join our team - because every role is a big role in our plans to go big.