Research Lead

As Research Lead at T&F, you will own the qualitative understanding of our users. Reporting to the Head of Product Design, you'll uncover our users' motivations, mental models, and unmet needs through interviews, usability studies, and diary studies. You are quantitatively literate enough to work alongside Customer Intelligence and Data Science, knowing when a hypothesis needs qual versus quant and how to triangulate between them.

You own research as a discipline at T&F, not just as a set of methods, but as a way of thinking that the product organization needs to internalize. Define and evolve our research practice, establishing the standards, methods, and ethical principles that govern how research is conducted across the organization. Build and maintain a research program that balances reactive support for active product work with proactive, generative research that gets ahead of the roadmap. Develop a research repository and knowledge management system that makes accumulated user insight accessible, searchable, and genuinely reusable across teams, preventing the same questions from being re-researched from scratch every six months. Build research literacy across the product organization, coaching Product Designers, Product Managers, and Business Analysts to conduct lightweight research confidently and responsibly, without creating dependency on the Research Lead for every study. Advocate for research investment at leadership level, making the case for why the time and resource spent on user understanding pays back in product quality and reduced rework.

The most valuable research at T&F is the research that reveals what the team does not yet know. You will lead the studies that open new problem spaces, not just validate solutions already in flight. Design and lead generative research studies, in-depth interviews, contextual inquiry, diary studies, and ethnographic observation that build deep understanding of users' goals and outcomes desired. Identify the most important unanswered questions about users and build a proactive research agenda to address them, rather than waiting for product teams to commission studies. Synthesize research findings into sharp, decision-relevant insight, producing outcomes that are genuinely actionable rather than descriptive, and that a PM or designer can use to make better decisions the same day they read them. Develop and maintain a nuanced understanding of core user segments, their goals, mental models, JTBD, trust triggers, and the moments in the experience that determine whether they stay or leave. Explore emerging customer needs and market shifts that the product team has not yet detected, bringing the outside view in and expanding the team's sense of what is possible and necessary.

Research is not only about discovery. You will also evaluate, ensuring that what is being built will work for the people it is built for, before and after it ships. Design and run usability studies, concept tests, and prototype evaluations across product domains, generating clear, prioritized findings that design and engineering teams can act on quickly. Establish a continuous evaluation rhythm, ensuring that live product experiences are regularly tested with real users, not just at launch. Work with Product Designers to build research into the design process at the right moments, not bolted on at the end, but integrated early enough to change the direction of a design before it is committed to build. Define the standard for what 'tested with users' means at T&F, including minimum sample sizes, participant criteria, and the difference between a quick validation check and a study that warrants significant design change.

The most powerful insights at T&F come from combining the human depth of qualitative research with the scale and precision of quantitative intelligence. You will be the person who bridges these two disciplines. Work in close, ongoing partnership with the Customer Intelligence Lead, bringing qualitative context to behavioral signals and using quantitative data to prioritize and scope qualitative investigations. Identify when a qualitative finding needs quantitative validation at scale, and work with the Data team to design the right measurement approach. Interpret quantitative anomalies (unexpected drops, surprising patterns, counterintuitive trends) through a qualitative lens, designing the research that explains what the data cannot. Contribute to the development of survey instruments and quantitative research designs where appropriate, bringing the craft of good question design to large-scale customer measurement programs. Work with Data Scientists to understand what behavioral data exists for a given research question and where the gaps are that only qualitative work can fill.

Research that stays in a report is research that was not finished. You will ensure that insight moves from study to decision, from finding to action. Develop user personas, journey maps, and experience principles that are genuinely grounded in research and genuinely used by the product team, not wall art. Present research findings to senior stakeholders, including VP Product and Head of Product Design, in a way that creates conviction and drives investment decisions. Create feedback loops between research and product that ensure insights are tracked through to action, following up on whether findings were used and understanding why they were not when they were not. Champion inclusive research practice, ensuring that research participants reflect the full diversity of T&F's user base, including users with access needs, lower digital literacy, and underserved segments.