Senior Futures Design Strategist (US Remote)

Company Overview

At Motorola Solutions, we believe that everything starts with our people. We’re a global close-knit community, united by the relentless pursuit to help keep people safer everywhere. We build and connect technologies to help protect people, property and places. Our solutions foster the collaboration that’s critical for safer communities, safer schools, safer hospitals, safer businesses, and ultimately, safer nations. Connect with a career that matters, and help us build a safer future.

Department Overview

At Motorola Solutions, we build technologies that help people be their best in the moments that matter. Our products support people working in complex, high-stakes environments — from public safety and emergency communications to enterprise security.

Understanding the people who use these technologies, the environments they work within and the challenges they face is fundamental to building products that are useful, trustworthy and effective.

The Futures Insights Team is Motorola Solutions’ research-led futures and strategic foresight pod, embedded within the broader UX Research organization. Our team is primarily split across the United States and United Kingdom. Our work sits between user experience research, strategic foresight, design, and business strategy. We partner across multiple functions while maintaining enough independence to challenge existing assumptions and investigate opportunities that do not yet fit neatly within today’s organizational boundaries.

We approach futuring/futures as a space that is explored and co-created rather than predicted. We seek direction in uncertainty, contradiction, edge cases and emerging behaviours – as well as in established customer needs. The aim is ultimately to create strategic option value for Motorola Solutions: making uncertain futures more intelligible and identifying high-leverage opportunities earlier.

Job Description

As a Senior Futures Design Strategist, you’ll help shape Horizon 3 (5–10+ year) product opportunities and make sure they lead somewhere. This role is for someone who can dream and be pragmatic. You’ll make futures tangible through artifacts, interfaces and narratives that let users and leaders step inside them. Then you’ll make them actionable by turning them into value propositions, opportunity briefs and investment choices the business can act on. As the team’s main design-focused individual contributor, you’ll own the bridge between our futures work and the teams who explore and build. That means making sure every promising concept has a credible next step and a clear owner. You might call yourself a design strategist, innovation strategist, speculative designer or innovation consultant. Whatever the title, we want to hear from you if you’ve made the future tangible, built the case around it, and helped senior leaders decide where to place their bets, and just as importantly, where not to.

Core Responsibilities

Speculative Prototyping & Design Fiction: Create tangible future-state artifacts (mock interfaces, speculative journey maps, world-building narratives) that let users and stakeholders step into, critique, and pressure-test 5–10+ year concepts before investment is committed.

Commercial Opportunity Framing: Translate abstract futures into viable business opportunities by defining value propositions, target users, business models, competitive positioning, and the key assumptions that must hold true, along with why it matters to Motorola Solutions now.

Activation & Handover: Scope Strategic Opportunity Briefs, run activation workshops, and transition validated concepts to downstream R&D, product, and incubation teams, so each promising concept leaves with a well-scoped next step and a clear owner.