Product Research Lead

About Rippling Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance. It brings together all of the workforce systems that are normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. For the first time ever, you can manage and automate every part of the employee lifecycle in a single system. Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds. Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.4B+ from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock—and was named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes. We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that all official communication will only be sent from @Rippling.com addresses.

About The Role

Running a company changes with scale. At a small business, one person may handle payroll, onboarding, and IT. In the mid-market, those jobs become handoffs across teams and systems. At enterprise scale, policies, entities, and exceptions multiply. AI raises a new question across all three: which parts of the work can software take on, and where do people need to stay in control? Product Research works before decisions are made. As Product Research Lead, you will help shape Rippling’s point of view on where the product should go next, across new products, categories, customer segments, and AI-native ways of working. Your scope will include foundational HR systems and the realities of hourly and complex workforces. The questions will often be broad, the product direction unresolved, and the implications larger than a single feature or team. This is a lead-level individual contributor role. You will personally lead research, develop a grounded point of view, and write for product and company leaders. You will work with product, design, engineering, and data partners to help teams choose a direction and understand the evidence behind it. This is a strategic role for someone who wants to influence company direction, define emerging product opportunities, and help determine how AI will reshape the way businesses operate.

Responsibilities

• Frame important questions before a solution or roadmap is defined, then design research that can change the decision.
• Learn how companies actually operate: the people, systems, rules, incentives, and workarounds behind a customer need.
• Find and recruit the people best positioned to answer or challenge the question, including participants who are hard to reach.
• Use sourcing and screening to learn about the market.
• Conduct rigorous qualitative research and combine it with behavioral data, market evidence, competitive context, and product knowledge when the question calls for it.
• Find patterns in messy evidence, test your interpretation against exceptions, and explain what you know, what remains uncertain, and why it matters.
• Identify which jobs matter enough for customers to change their behavior or adopt a new product.
• Translate that understanding into choices about which customer to serve, what opportunity to pursue, and what must be true for a solution to work.
• Write and present a clear main judgment for the audience and decision at hand. Show what you mean through concrete customer behavior, with deeper evidence ready when needed.
• Build trust with partners, challenge assumptions constructively, and stay involved as research becomes product direction.
• Strengthen the team's research practice through mentorship, critique, hiring, and your own work.

Requirements

• A record of applied research on complex products, services, or organizations, including work that influenced product direction before the solution was settled.
• Experience with B2B software or business operations is especially relevant.
• Strong qualitative research skills and sound judgment about when quantitative, behavioral, market, or competitive evidence would strengthen the answer.
• Inductive and systems thinking: you can move from specific observations to a useful explanation while accounting for the roles, rules, and dependencies around them.
• Product and business judgment: you can identify the question that matters, recognize a meaningful opportunity, and recommend a direction without overstating the evidence.
• Exceptional writing and storytelling: you can lead with the point, make it tangible through examples, and adjust the level of detail for product teams and senior leaders.
• The ability to build trust with demanding partners, disagree