Customer Experience and Innovation Manager - Consumer Products

Company description

Publicis Sapient is a digital transformation partner helping established organizations get to their future, digitally enabled state, both in the way they work and the way they serve their customers. We help unlock value through a start-up mindset and modern methods, fusing strategy, consulting, and customer experience with agile engineering and problem-solving creativity. United by our core values and our purpose of helping people thrive in the brave pursuit of next, our 20,000+ people in 53 offices around the world combine experience across technology, data sciences, consulting, and customer obsession to accelerate our clients' businesses through designing the products and services their customers truly value.

Overview

Our clients are navigating a period of extraordinary change. Customer expectations are rising, competitive dynamics are shifting, and AI is opening up entirely new possibilities in how experiences are designed, how services are delivered, and how value is created.

The Role

As a Manager in CX&I, you'll help clients make sense of that landscape and act on it. You will lead workstreams that define future-state customer and employee experiences, grounded in research and shaped by design thinking.

As AI becomes a foundational part of customer experience, you will judge when and where it should be applied - and when more traditional approaches better serve the client and their customers.

You will work in small, multidisciplinary teams directly with client stakeholders, often embedded with them to build solutions collaboratively rather than presenting recommendations from a distance.

This is a hands-on, client-facing role where you are equally comfortable running stakeholder workshops, mapping end-to-end service blueprints, stress-testing concepts with real customer data, and using AI tools to accelerate solutions that can be tested in real-world contexts.

What You'll Do

Lead CX strategy and service design workstreams

You will deploy a wide range of CX tools, techniques, and frameworks to drive concept and proposition development, including:

• Customer research and persona creation
• New product innovation
• Value proposition development
• North Star definition and strategic framing
• Prioritisation frameworks
• Roadmap development

You will map end-to-end customer and employee experiences, connecting front-stage interactions to back-stage operations, and identifying the policy, process, technology, and data changes required to deliver them.

You will:

• Hold internal AI-powered experiences to the same standards users expect as consumers
• Design more capable roles as AI takes on routine work
• Own the quality and narrative of workstreams from insight through to delivery
• Build alignment across functions with competing priorities
• Frame recommendations as testable hypotheses tied to real customer problems and measurable outcomes
• Shape client and commercial narratives to position recommendations effectively

Bring a working understanding of AI to every engagement

You will understand how AI is reshaping industries—not just technically, but in terms of business models, competitive positioning, and customer expectations.

You will:

• Design AI-native customer experiences, products, services, and business models
• Design internal AI solutions that reshape how work gets done - tools layered onto unchanged processes
• Own adoption and change, ensuring solutions are used and deliver value

You will apply AI tools across the full lifecycle of a project:

• Research & synthesis - analysing large datasets, interviews, and market signals to uncover insights
• Persona & journey development - generating and validating experience frameworks
• Ideation & concept design - exploring multiple directions through rapid simulation and testing
• Prototyping & building - creating interactive, testable artefacts
• Content & narrative - producing high-quality client deliverables with strong editorial judgement

You will use these tools pragmatically - selecting them when they improve speed, quality, or breadth of thinking.

Work in forward-deployed teams, building with clients in real time

You will operate in compact, multidisciplinary teams embedded with clients.

You will:

• Learn client systems, constraints, and culture from the inside
• Co-own outcomes and adapt as priorities evolve
• Deliver iteratively, using short cycles to test and refine solutions

Success is defined as embedment and measurable impact:

• Solutions are used by real users
• They deliver tangible business outcomes

For internal solutions, you will:

• Prove concepts through working pilots under real conditions
• Use real usage data to validate success
• Help build measurement frameworks and incentives into operating models

Grow relationships and contribute to the practice

You will:

• Identify opportunities to extend client engagements through delivered value
• Contribute to proposals, pitches, and thought leadership
• Feed reusable insights and patterns back into the practice
• Coach and develop junior team members, modelling effective use of AI

What You'll Bring

• Curiosity about AI's impact on industries
  You actively explore how AI is reshaping customer expectations, business models, and competition
• Hands-on AI fluency
  Experience using tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Cursor, or equivalent as part of your day-to-day work
• Strong evaluative judgement with AI
  You understand when to trust outputs, when to challenge them, and when human judgement is required
• Service design and journey thinking expertise
  Ability to connect customer experiences to operational, data, and technology foundations
• Commercial instinct
  Comfortable translating CX work into business value and investment cases
• Strong collaboration and team development mindset
  You coach others, build relationships, and contribute to team growth
• Comfort working in an embedded delivery model
  You thrive working close to the client, building and iterating in real time
• Industry experience (must-have)
  Depth in at least one priority sector:
  • Consumer Products
  • Financial Services
  • Travel & Hospitality

Additional experience in sectors such as Retail, Energy, or Automotive is an advantage.

What Sets This Role Apart

This is not a traditional consulting model.

You will not spend months producing static reports. Instead, you will be embedded in small teams that move quickly and deliver working solutions.

We treat adoption as a design problem - not an afterthought. Success depends not on building something, but on whether people actively use it and it delivers sustained value.

You will have access to Publicis Sapient's AI platforms - Bodhi, Slingshot, and Sustain - alongside leading partner technologies, enabling small teams to deliver outsized impact.

You will work alongside teams:

• Rethinking customer engagement for global banks
• Redesigning loyalty in travel and aviation
• Transforming automotive retail journeys
• Building AI-powered public sector services

We are looking for people who:

• Excel in customer experience strategy and design
• Are genuinely curious about AI
• Are energised by building and delivering - not just advising

Additional information

• An inclusive workplace that promotes diversity and collaboration.
• Access to ongoing learning and development opportunities.
• Competitive compensation and benefits package.
• Flexibility to support work-life balance.
• Comprehensive health benefits for you and your family.
• Generous paid leave and holidays.
• Wellness program and employee assistance.

As part of our dedication to an inclusive and diverse workforce, Publicis Sapient is committed to Equal Employment Opportunity without regard for race, color, national origin, ethnicity, gender, protected veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religion. We are also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at hiring@publicis.sapient.com