Experience Research & Design Manager

Job Description

What will the employee do in this role?

50% Leading and mentoring researchers/designers and 50% doing the following:

• Understanding and influencing stakeholders and agile teams to improve the user experience
• Aiding with quantitative and qualitative studies for First Command. This includes consulting with the business on study objectives and methodologies, creating the project plan and timeline, survey creation and pretesting, managing any contractors, leading analysis, and writing and delivering final reports
• Aiding in facilitating workshops
• Evangeling the importance of user research & design in all phases of software development, from concept to release
• Aiding in communicating with all of First Command the wants and needs of the client
• Collaborating with the business stakeholders, IT, other researchers, marketing, and design leaders to ensure research translates into business impact
• Aiding in strategizing research into end-to-end client journeys
• Working closely with UX and data teams and using research methodologies to discover, learn and validate needs within various market opportunities
• Creating & validating new designs through ad-hoc or formalized user feedback sessions with internal users or clients

Skills & Qualifications

• Education: A Degree in related studies (Human Computer Interaction, Data Science, Interaction Design, Cognitive Science, Psychology, etc.), or equivalent real-world experience
• Work Experience: 3-6 years in UX related role doing research and design, 2-3 years managing UX researchers/designers, Experience managing qualitative and quantitative research projects including multi-phase, multi-mode projects.
• Ability to do design work in tools such as Figma (the primary one we use)
• Familiarity with current and emerging KPI’s, benchmarks and success metrics (Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction Scores, Customer Effort Score, System Usability Score, etc.)
• Experience with survey and measurement tools (Ex: Qualtrics, UserTesting.com)
• Experience turning insights in to action, with the ability to tell a compelling story about the wants and needs of our clients

Required Knowledge, Skills, And Abilities

• A passion for leading, career growth, and a strong ability to motivate others
• Caring and compassion for others including a commitment to psychological safety
• Promoting UX maturity and advocate for the value it provides the organization
• Knowledge of UX Trends
• Must be comfortable communicating with and influencing leaders at all levels
• Genuine passion for problem-solving, are comfortable with ambiguity, and rise to challenges with creativity
• Comfortable working closely with passionate researchers, designers, product owners, scrum masters, technologists, marketers, and data scientists that all care deeply about driving our customer experience vision
• Takes a collaborative approach to projects, continually holding the user’s perspective while balancing a diverse range of stakeholder objectives

Preferred Knowledge, Skills, And Abilities

• Financial Services experience
• Military experience