One of the leading sports institutions in the world is looking for a senior design researcher with solid practical and theoretical knowledge on generative and evaluative research, in both qualitative and quantitative methods. He/she will join the product team as the sole researcher. Although there is already a certain research infrastructure in place, there is a big challenge for setting up the research practice within the team and making sure research insights are an essential part of the product development cycles. The candidate we’re looking for requires certain leadership & collaboration skills to make sure our initiatives go through and get the right focus and understanding, contributing to a cultural change. Within a remote set-up, ability to work both autonomously and collaboratively is required.

Main responsibilities

A good mix of research-ops, research strategy and stakeholders management to establish the research practice as a key pillar of the product development cycles:

• Identify current knowledge gaps and execute ad-hoc research initiatives to fill them
• Run discovery interviews with the different niche audiences and convert these insights into user personas that we can use as a design and conversational tool between us and for internal and external stakeholders.
• Develop a framework to run regular interviews and usability testing sessions for existing and under-development product features and experiences, as well as existing features and product experiences from competitors
• Develop a standardised format to report user insights in a way that is understandable and actionable for relevant teams and stakeholders
• Communicate regularly user insights to the relevant teams and stakeholders, especially after a set of interviews or usability testing sessions
• Create, maintain and evolve a research system, a knowledge base to collect all the observations and insights from all our research projects
• Define sampling and recruiting processes
• Recruitment of users for usability testing sessions, interviews, online surveys. etc. using existing tools (Qualtrics, Userzoom) or others when needed
• Built generic and specific surveys for the different products or parts of the product, and analyse them on a regular basis
• Define together with the Product Designer, Product Owner and Product Manager a research plan that will inform the vision for the different products we have.
• Interact and collaborate with different internal stakeholders, making sure we’re getting all buy-in needed for our research initiatives
• Guide and lead external research agencies if/whenever is needed for larger projects

Requirements

• More than 3 years of experience recruiting users, conducting usability testing sessions, and extracting relevant insights
• More than 3 years of experience conducting interviews and applying customer discovery techniques
• Proven experience setting up a research practice as part of an agile digital product development framework
• Ability to look at the broader picture and define comprehensive research plans in collaboration with other experts
• Excellent English communication and presentation skills
• Demonstrable experience building research systems
• Ability to work remotely and still promote and be an example of collaboration
• Proven experience in different generative and evaluative research techniques
• Research experience on big media or sports products, targeting a broad audience spectrum but also niche audiences
• Demonstrable user behaviour analysis skills through google analytics or equivalent is a nice to have

Additional information

• Remote job. European area. Ideally CET +/-1
• 1 year long freelance contract
• 50% dedication