Overall Impact
- You are trusted to lead research in areas that are ambiguous, risky, or critical to product success.
- Your proactive impact spans beyond individual studies to shaping how product teams think, plan, and make decisions.
- Define and drive research strategy for a key strategic vertical, aligning insight work to customer problems and outcomes inline with our business strategy.
- Influence how tripods (Product, Design, and Engineering) operate by embedding evidence and usability into discovery, delivery, and iteration.
- Operationalize research practices and mentor others across the org on research-informed decision-making and human-centered innovation.
- Raise the visibility bar across the company on how we understand customers and their evolving pain points.
- Act as a multiplier: operating with little guidance to enable better, faster decisions across the product lifecycle, and championing a qualitative and quantitative approach.
- You are seen as a trusted strategic partner and influence investment decisions and long-term planning.
- Your work leads to measurable improvements in product-market fit, user satisfaction, and adoption.
- Provide insight that drives measurable revenue growth and enables teams to deliver with clarity and confidence against our product vision.
- Anticipates systemic challenges and proactively aligns research with evolving business models, resource limitations, and competitive pressures.
Research Leadership & Strategic Insight
- Drive generative and foundational research efforts that shape product vision and inform early-stage bets.
- Develop and socialize long-range research roadmaps that anticipate business evolution and customer trajectory, in partnership with product, design, and engineering leads.
- Proactively identify gaps in understanding and design studies that go beyond validation toward discovery, driving long-range insight strategies.
- Translate ambiguous business problems into clear research questions and methodologies.
- Leverage mixed methods to triangulate insights, from in-depth qualitative to survey-based quant or usage analytics.
Research Execution
- Own and execute research prioritization, high-quality research studies independently or in collaboration with others, and sequencing in order to ensure alignment with business rhythms, engineering constraints, and product delivery timelines.
- Synthesize findings into clear, persuasive narratives that influence decision-making at multiple levels.
- Creates scalable frameworks and repeatable mechanisms (e.g., journey maps, templates, ops integrations) that elevate team understanding and increase throughput and decision velocity.
- Balance speed and rigor β knowing when to go deep, and when to move fast.
Collaboration
- Act as a strategic thought partner to design, product, and engineering leadership.
- Models continuous growth through active learning and industry engagement (talks, publications, communities); develops others and helps advance standards across the field.
- Drive and influence prioritization through insight-backed framing of customer problems and opportunities.
- Facilitate workshops and co-creation sessions to align teams on research findings and implications.
- Partner with data science, support, and analytics teams to paint a holistic view of the user experience.
Team Citizenship
- Mentor junior and mid-level researchers; provide feedback, support, and strategic guidance.
- Contribute to the evolution of our research ops, tooling, and education efforts.
- Be a multiplier for both researchers and non-researchers by coaching cross-functional partners (including tripods) to integrate research fluency and evidence-guided decision-making into their daily practice.
- Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and team culture-building efforts.
What You Should Have
- Expert and sought-out authority in human-centered strategy; translates market, customer, and technology shifts into actionable research direction.
- Bachelorβs or Masterβs degree in HCI, Psychology, Human Factors, Sociology, or related field.
- 12+ years of experience in UX research, with a proven track record of driving strategic impact in complex product spaces.
- Familiarity with tools such as UserTesting, User Interviews, Maze, Qualtrics, or Looker.
- Expert in qualitative and quantitative research methods, and when/how to apply them.
- Strong communicator with the ability to distill complexity and advocate for users with clarity and confidence.
- Experience working in SaaS or tech-focused environments with agile product teams.
- Deeply collaborative and comfortable in cross-functional decision-making environments.
- Strategic mindset with an ability to connect the dots between insights, opportunity, and outcomes.
- Resilient, thoughtful, and highly self-motivated.
Nice To Haves
- Experience mentoring researchers or building research functions.
- Background working with AI-driven or complex system products.
- Familiarity with research ops practices and tools.