What does “strategic design” mean? A look at 232 Nordic job advertisements for designers

What do employers look for when they are hiring a designer? This article looks at how design job ads across the Nordic countries describe strategic work, and what that reveals about where the profession is heading. It focuses on the idea that designers are both planners and executors of strategy inside organizations. 

“Strategic design” has become an umbrella term for the expansion of designers’ roles beyond individual products or interfaces (Dziobczenski 2024). It’s usually described as a move from strategy implementation (e.g. designing touchpoints, executing a brief) to also include strategy formulation: defining the problem, shaping the vision, setting direction (Calabretta & Gemser 2017). While doing ‘strategic design, designers increasingly act early in the process, reframing problems and shaping roadmaps before translating intent into artefacts. 

In our paper recently published in the DRS conference (Dziobczenski & Björklund 2026), we looked at this distinction between strategy formulation and implementation. Here we present a summary of that paper in a more practical way. 

In short, we analyzed 232 job ads for design roles on LinkedIn across the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden), collected in August–September 2025. In the paper, we looked at the sentences in the advertisements describing a designer’s tasks that were coded as strategy formulation (SF) or strategy implementation (SI). Here is how we defined each of the two categories with a few examples from the dataset.

What the ads ask for

Implementation appeared in every single ad (232 of 232). Formulation appeared in less than half: 104 of 232 (44.8%) and concentrated in senior roles: junior 23.5% (4/17), mid-level 33.8% (44/130), senior 65.9% (56/85). 

It also varies by design field: graphic & visual 20% (9/45), game 40% (6/15), digital & product 58.4% (73/125), service 80% (4/5, small sample). By country, formulation held fairly steady, 43–50% across all five markets.

For anyone reading the job market, the pattern is worth keeping in mind. Implementation skills are something every designer should have, but the language of framing, visioning, and setting direction is what increasingly marks out senior roles. If you want to grow into strategy work, it helps to show — in a portfolio and in interviews — not only what you made, but which problems you chose to take on, and why.

There’s a message for organisations here too. A company that only ever describes design as implementation may be under-using its designers: asking them to build well-defined things rather than help decide which things are worth building. And the reassuring part for anyone growing into strategy work is that formulation isn’t a separate toolbox: it’s the same core design skills - research, framing, synthesis, prototyping, but pointed at an earlier, more open question.

Final thoughts

• Every designer does implementation, not every designer is asked to do formulation. 
• Formulation rises with seniority and varies by field, highest in service and digital/product design, lowest in graphic and visual design.
• When formulation does appear, it shows up at two levels: company-level (setting vision and direction for the whole design function, mostly senior roles) or product/service-level (shaping a roadmap or portfolio, more common and often cross-functional).
• Our paper gives designers examples of the language used when design is moving to a more strategic level. This can help when shaping CVs and portfolios to showcase the type of work designers are doing and connect it to strategic design.