Job Description
Your Role and Responsibilities
- Strategic Responsibilities
- Demonstrate deep domain knowledge and understanding of key users and the market.
- Demonstrate fluency in your portfolio’s business strategy and the value proposition of the product(s) within your scope.
- Help align the design work of your team with product strategies and user experience insights/requirements.
- Influence decisions tied to the business strategy and processes of your products.
- Establish and own research goals for your Product (aligned with business strategy) and measure progress towards those goals.
- Participate in portfolio Commitment pitches, MMT, OMT, Lean Governance, etc. meetings.
- Be an SME that acts as the voice of the customers.
- Cross-Functional Responsibilities
- Lead research efforts for a product(s) project(s).
- Help drive the execution of an experience roadmap based on awareness of user and business needs.
- Advocate for end user experience, steer design and development in a different direction when needed.
- Closely partner with Product management and development to cultivate, manage, and administer sponsor user relationships.
- Work with Agile product team leaders to measure progress and review design outcomes against user insights (via playbacks).
- Be an active member of Product squad(s) by attending and presenting playbacks, coaching designers, providing input in the prioritization of Product backlog.
- When applicable, participate in planning and other product delivery processes.
- Champion research as a driving force for innovation.
- Participate in cross-disciplinary collaboration to facilitate innovation.
- Functional Responsibilities
- Acquire skills in specialized research techniques.
- Determine types of research needed on individual initiatives and develop research goals and plans.
- Evaluate early ideas for products, workflows or features to determine viability.
- Execute product/project research deliverables in alignment with project timeline and roadmap milestones.
- Develop and engage network of sponsor users.
- Explore, document and socialize what matters most to customers.
- Run sponsor user efforts throughout the lifecycle (recruiting, sessions, synthesis playbacks).
- Build your eminence with our customer base and the external business industry you engage with.
- Identify cross-disciplinary partners who will champion research.
- Define user experience goals and design principles.
- Help align 3-in-a-box teams to research insights, utilize research insights to drive prioritization of product backlog and roadmap.
- Develop strong storytelling capabilities.
- Build your eminence in the design world outside of IBM and contribute to IBM and IBM Design to grow your presence internally.
- Support and guide individual designers through leadership, coaching, and mentoring.
- Engage with broader IBM Z Research community.
- Actively lead efforts benefiting the design community (e.g., innovation processes, community building, etc)
- Share expertise at studio-wide events.
Required Technical and Professional Expertise
- Expert-level design research skills
- Experience with IBM-preferred research tools, including Alchemer, UserInterviews and AirTable.
- Extensive experience in defining and executing UX Metrics assessments.
- Competency with standard presentation programs Powerpoint & Keynote.
- Strong portfolio showing a breadth of complex, technically-oriented projects.
- Minimum Requirements:
- A minimum of 3 years of experience in executing research deliverables on design projects.
- A minimum of 4 years of experience in product or service design.
- A minimum of 2 years of experience working with product managers and engineers.
- A minimum of 4 years of experience in a hands-on design research role.
- A minimum of 4 years of experience with design research tools, including analytics tools.
- Demonstrated experience conducting design research and familiarity with research practices.
- Exposure to Agile processes (e.g., SAFe), enterprise design thinking, managing allocation and prioritization discussions, and the IBM Universal Experiences.
- Portfolio of projects that demonstrate your skills as a design researcher.