New title. New role.
Director of Creative Intelligence sits at the intersection of design vision, human judgement, and the emerging world of AI-driven creative work. This is not a job about using AI tools. It's a job about leading with them, knowing when to direct them, when to challenge them, and when to set them aside entirely.
You will be Canoe's creative authority across our full practice, product design, service development, organisational design, and learning. The person who sets the quality bar across every discipline, shapes how we work with our clients, and builds the internal capability for us to move faster, think deeper, and create better than we ever have before. This isn’t a role that sits above the work. It sits inside it.
You will also be the architect of how Canoe uses agentic AI in our creative practice. That means owning our approach, mentoring that vision, not just adopting tools, but building a point of view. Deciding which parts of the creative process benefit from intelligent assistance, and which parts must remain stubbornly, irreplaceably human.
In a world where anyone can generate a layout, a service blueprint, a change plan, or a learning programme, your judgment is the product.
What you’ll do
- Set the creative direction. You’ll lead the creative vision across Canoe’s full portfolio, digital products, service design, organisational change programmes, and learning initiatives. You’ll be the person in the room who knows what good looks and feels like, and who won’t settle until we get there.
- Own our agentic design strategy. You’ll define how Canoe works with AI in the creative process, not as a policy, but as a living practice. You’ll explore what it means to orchestrate intelligent tools in service of human outcomes, to direct agents rather than execute tasks, and to build workflows that multiply our creative capacity without diminishing our craft.
- Bridge design and delivery. You’ll work closely with developers, strategists, and clients to ensure the experience we design is the one that ships. The last mile matters. Typography, motion, feel, and the small interactions that make the whole thing come alive, you care about all of it and enjoy getting into the weeds.
- Build for continuity. Whether a client’s customer is navigating an industrial dashboard, moving through a service on their phone, going through a change initiative, or learning a new capability, the experience should feel coherent and considered. You’ll think in systems, journeys, and relationships, across every discipline we touch, not just screens.
- Get in and do the work. This isn’t a purely directorial role. You’ll roll up your sleeves, prototype, facilitate, write, and deliver alongside the team. You’ll jump into briefs, make things, and demonstrate what good looks like through action as much as direction. The best leaders at Canoe lead by doing, and that’s what we expect here.
- Raise the floor for everyone. You’ll shape how the team thinks and works, across design, service development, organisational practice, and learning, sharing your perspective, modelling your process, building frameworks that outlast any single project, and helping Canoe grow in capability and confidence. Teaching isn’t just part of the job. It’s one of the most important parts.
- Design with responsibility. Our clients serve real people. You’ll hold us accountable to inclusive, ethical, transparent design.
Who you are
- You’ve spent enough time designing to know what craft actually means. But you’re not precious about it. You’ve begun to let go of how things used to be done, because you’re curious about what comes next.
- You’re comfortable directing the creative process without controlling every output. You know how to give AI a clear enough intent that it becomes genuinely useful, and you know when to override it entirely.
- You have strong opinions about quality, and you’re willing to defend them. Your judgment is your most valuable tool.
- You think strategically. You can look at a messy brief, a complex organisation, or an unresolved experience and find the real question underneath the obvious one. You’re as useful in a client conversation as you are in a design file.
- You’re a generalist with a strong centre of gravity. You can hold the practice together across product design, service development, organisational work, and learning, across multiple project types and client contexts, without losing the thread of what makes Canoe’s work distinctive.
- You’re not above doing. You might be leading the client conversation in one moment and building the prototype in the next. The relationship between maker and manager doesn’t constrain you, if anything, the willingness to do is exactly where your credibility to lead comes from.
- You bring warmth into the room. Warmth as the genuine belief that the people we design for deserve our best thinking.
- You’re comfortable with code. You can speak machine, you know your way around the terminal, and you can alter a class when it’s quicker than prompting.
- You're comfortable with a Scandinavian language.
Note
This role demands a lot. The ambition behind it is real, and so is the responsibility. We’re not looking for someone who is comfortable at this, we’re looking for someone who is ready for it. If you read this and felt a flicker of both excitement and hesitation, that’s probably the right reaction.
