Staff UX Research Strategist

About the role

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff UX Research Strategist based in the United States. As a Staff UX Research Strategist, you will help shape what the organization builds next through forward-looking, generative research. The role blends UX research with market research, allowing you to move between deep user understanding and broader market opportunity assessment. You will identify emerging needs, competitive shifts, and strategic opportunities that can influence product and business direction. Working across Product, Design, Analytics, Marketing, Sales, and Client Services, you will bring evidence to high-stakes strategic decisions. You will also help establish a strategic insights function that gives leadership an early view of emerging opportunities and risks. This is a highly influential role for an experienced researcher who enjoys ambiguity, systems thinking, and using AI to make research more scalable and impactful.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end foundational and generative research across new and emerging product areas, uncovering unmet user needs and translating them into meaningful product and business opportunities.
• Apply market research rigor to product strategy by assessing ideal customer profiles, segmentation, value propositions, product-market fit, market sizing, competitive dynamics, and emerging opportunities.
• Develop a forward-looking perspective on market and industry trends, identifying competitive shifts, regulatory developments, and broader tailwinds that could influence strategic priorities.
• Evaluate competing opportunities and build clear, evidence-based recommendations around where to invest, explicitly articulating assumptions, risks, potential upside, and opportunity costs.
• Co-own a strategic insights function in partnership with Product Analytics, synthesizing signals from across the business and external market to provide leadership with an early view of emerging opportunities and risks.
• Act as a strategic thought partner to Product and Design leadership, challenging assumptions, introducing evidence, and influencing high-stakes product and business strategy discussions.
• Collaborate with Vertical Solutions teams to deepen understanding of priority industries, support research initiatives, and identify opportunities specific to different market segments.
• Partner with Marketing, Sales, and Client Services to translate research and market insights into go-to-market strategies, positioning, and product launch approaches.
• Coach and develop UX Research colleagues in strategic foresight and market research methodologies, helping establish shared playbooks and stronger research capabilities across the team.
• Apply AI tools thoughtfully throughout the research workflow, using them for activities such as synthesis, analysis, recruiting, and documentation while maintaining appropriate human judgment and research rigor.
• Identify and implement improvements to research tools, processes, and workflows, using AI and automation where appropriate to create scalable approaches that improve research quality and efficiency.

Requirements

• Bring 7–10 years of applied research experience, with a portfolio demonstrating that your research has identified new opportunities and influenced product or business strategy rather than simply validating pre-existing decisions.
• Demonstrate experience spanning both UX research and market research, including qualitative and quantitative research methods as well as opportunity assessment, market sizing, ICP definition, segmentation, value proposition development, product-market fit, and competitive research.
• Bring domain expertise in digital advertising, adtech, martech, data-driven platforms, or privacy-sensitive B2B technology markets, with the ability to connect market shifts, customer needs, competitive dynamics, and regulatory trends to product direction.
• Demonstrate comfort working in ambiguous, complex, and loosely defined problem spaces, supported by strong systems thinking that connects user, market, and business perspectives.
• Have experience influencing senior leaders such as Directors, VPs, or C-suite stakeholders by developing compelling strategic narratives and business cases based on research evidence.
• Be comfortable partnering with analytics and data teams to combine quantitative signals with qualitative research and turn synthesized insights into discovery opportunities.
• Have experience facilitating workshops such as ideation and co-creation sessions and driving research findings into concrete product and strategic decisions.
• Demonstrate hands-on