Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for UX Planner

🎯 Role Definition

The UX Planner is a strategic design role responsible for defining and operationalizing the user experience roadmap across products and services. This role blends user research, information architecture, service design, and product strategy to shape user-centered experiences that meet business goals. The UX Planner partners with product managers, designers, researchers, engineers, and stakeholders to translate user needs into prioritized initiatives, measurable UX outcomes, and repeatable design patterns.

Keywords: UX Planner, user experience strategy, UX roadmap, information architecture, journey mapping, usability testing, accessibility, design systems, product UX.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

UX Designer with cross-functional planning experience
Product Designer or Interaction Designer focused on systems thinking
UX Researcher or Information Architect seeking strategic scope

Advancement To:

Senior UX Planner / Lead UX Planner
UX Strategy Lead / Head of UX Strategy
Director of Product Design or Director of UX
Head of Design Systems or VP of Product Experience

Lateral Moves:

Product Manager (strategy-heavy products)
Design Systems Lead
UX Research Lead / Service Design Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Develop and own a multi-product UX strategy and roadmap that aligns user research insights with business objectives, product OKRs, and technical constraints.
Lead discovery and framing sessions to identify user problems, business opportunities, and measurable UX outcomes using qualitative and quantitative inputs.
Conduct and synthesize user research (interviews, contextual inquiry, surveys) to produce personas, behavioral segments, and user journeys that guide product decisions and prioritization.
Design and maintain high-level information architecture and navigation models that scale across product ecosystems, improving findability and task completion rates.
Create and communicate experience blueprints, service maps, and journey maps that visualize cross-channel interactions and handoffs between systems, teams, and partners.
Translate research and strategy into deliverables—wireframes, flows, prototypes, and acceptance criteria—that designers and engineers can implement quickly and consistently.
Define UX success metrics (task time, conversion, SUS, NPS) and set up measurement frameworks with analytics partners to track adoption, usability, and business impact.
Drive usability testing programs (moderated and unmoderated), A/B testing, and phased pilots to validate hypotheses, reduce risk and iterate on design decisions.
Build, steward, and evolve a design system and component library to ensure consistency, accessibility, and engineering efficiency across products.
Prioritize UX initiatives and backlog items by impact, effort, and strategic importance, facilitating trade-off discussions and alignment with product and engineering leadership.
Serve as the primary liaison between product, engineering, marketing, legal, and operations to ensure UX considerations are embedded in planning, releases, and compliance.
Facilitate cross-functional workshops (design sprints, alignment sessions, hypothesis mapping) to accelerate ideation and decision-making across distributed teams.
Establish accessibility standards (WCAG) and coordinate audits and remediation plans to ensure products are inclusive and compliant.
Create onboarding, documentation, and governance artifacts (guidelines, patterns, personas) to help teams adopt UX best practices and reduce duplicated work.
Manage stakeholder expectations and communicate UX tradeoffs, timelines, and impact through clear artifacts, presentations, and executive summaries.
Lead prioritization and scoping conversations with product managers to ensure UX tasks are appropriately resourced and integrated into sprint planning.
Mentor junior UX designers, researchers, and planners—providing feedback, career coaching, and tooling support to raise team capability.
Monitor industry trends, competitive benchmarks, and emerging design patterns to inform the UX roadmap and maintain competitive differentiation.
Partner with data/analytics to run funnel analysis, session replay reviews, and heatmap studies to uncover usability issues and conversion opportunities.
Plan and manage UX research budgets, vendor relationships (usability vendors, recruiting agencies), and external contractors to scale research capacity.
Prepare go-to-market UX readiness checks for product launches including final usability sign-off, localization readiness, and documentation for support teams.
Continually improve UX processes (design reviews, handoff standards, QA checklists) to increase delivery predictability and product quality.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Assist in preparing executive-level reports and stakeholder updates about UX metrics and progress.
Provide subject-matter expertise for procurement or vendor selection related to UX tools and platforms.
Support training initiatives for non-design stakeholders to build UX literacy across the organization.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

UX Strategy & Roadmapping: Experience building multi-quarter UX roadmaps connected to business metrics.
User Research Methods: Skilled in interviews, usability testing, surveys, field studies, and rapid validation techniques.
Information Architecture & Content Strategy: Proven ability to design scalable navigation, taxonomies, and content models.
Interaction Design & Prototyping: Fluent with wireframing and prototyping tools (Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, Axure, Framer).
Usability Testing & Experimentation: Designing, executing, and analyzing usability studies and A/B tests.
Design Systems & Component Libraries: Experience creating and maintaining shared components, tokens, and pattern libraries.
Analytics & Measurement: Familiarity with Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap or similar tools to inform UX decisions.
Accessibility (WCAG): Practical experience auditing and implementing accessibility best practices.
Basic Front-End Understanding: Working knowledge of HTML, CSS and how designs translate to implementation constraints.
Agile & Product Delivery: Practical experience working in Scrum/Kanban environments, pairing with PMs and engineers.
Service Design & Journey Mapping: Ability to document and optimize multi-touch user experiences across channels.
Vendor & Budget Management: Experience managing external research vendors and small budgets.

Soft Skills

Strategic Thinking: Able to connect UX efforts to long-term business goals and measurable outcomes.
Communication & Storytelling: Clear, persuasive communication for stakeholders at all levels, including executives.
Cross-functional Collaboration: Proven collaborator who builds trust across design, product, engineering, research, and marketing.
Empathy & User Advocacy: Deep commitment to representing real user needs in product decisions.
Facilitation & Workshop Leadership: Skilled at guiding workshops and alignment sessions to deliver actionable results.
Prioritization & Decision-Making: Comfortable making trade-offs and recommending pragmatic solutions.
Attention to Detail: Meticulous about experience quality, edge cases, and documentation.
Coaching & Mentorship: Experience mentoring junior designers and fostering growth in teams.
Problem Solving & Systems Thinking: Able to identify root causes and design end-to-end solutions.
Influencing without Authority: Able to gain buy-in and move cross-functional initiatives forward.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, Cognitive Psychology, Information Science, Industrial Design, Computer Science, or a related field.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in HCI, Service Design, UX Strategy, Human Factors, or an MBA with product/design focus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Interaction / Industrial / Graphic Design
Cognitive Psychology or Behavioral Science
Information Science / Library Science
Computer Science (with UX specialization)
Service Design / Service Innovation

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3 - 8+ years in UX, product design, or UX research roles with increasing strategic responsibility.

Preferred:

5+ years delivering UX strategy and roadmaps across multi-product environments.
Demonstrated track record of leading research programs, building information architectures, or owning design systems.
Experience in B2B SaaS, consumer platforms, or regulated industries (finance, healthcare) is a plus.

If you would like, I can also:

Tailor this job summary and responsibilities to a specific industry (fintech, healthcare, e-commerce).
Produce a concise job posting for recruiting platforms (LinkedIn, Indeed) based on this file.
Convert responsibilities into JDs for Senior or Lead UX Planner levels.