Senior Director, User Research

The Opportunity

"As a Sr. Director of UX Research you will lead and scale our user research function across a portfolio of complex and highly specialized B2B SaaS products. You will have the opportunity to build a culture of research and take the UX practice to the next level. Your impact will range from shaping feature-level interactions to steering product roadmap ends through evidence-based UX strategy. This is a perfect role for a senior research practitioner who thrives on building from the ground up and is comfortable owning both the strategic direction of a practice and the delivery of world-class, high-quality insights through hands-on work." - VP, Product Design

What You’ll Contribute 

• Act as the primary UX research lead across multiple product teams, directly planning and executing complex generative and evaluative research studies.

• Partner with product design, product management, and engineering to embed customer empathy into our product development process, from discovery through launch.

• Build and scale user research operations: including participant recruitment processes, consent/data privacy guidelines, tooling, and insight repositories.

• Produce actionable, synthesized research outputs, personas, journey maps, opportunity frameworks, UX scorecards, etc. that influence product decisions.

• Define, track, and report UX metrics, usability benchmarks, and customer sentiment over time (in collaboration with data and analytics partners).

• Coach and mentor research teammates while maintaining personal involvement in key studies, ranging from 1:1 interviews and usability studies to multi-phase discovery research.

• Develop a roadmap for growing UX research as a practice and discipline horizontally across the organization.

• Evangelize the value of UX research to executive, product, and engineering stakeholders; create research education programs, playbooks, and onboarding experiences.

• Establish and scale research rituals and templates, study briefs, session guides, findings formats, presentation frameworks; to empower reproducible, high-quality work.

• Be a visible and credible voice for customer-centered thinking within FICO, in product planning meetings, quarterly roadmap reviews, and functional team ceremonies.

• Partner with other UX leaders to influence the overall design-maturity model for FICO’s design and delivery ecosystem.

What We’re Seeking

• 12+ years of progressive experience in user research for digital products, including 5+ years in a leadership or player-coach capacity.

• Proven track record of executing hands-on generative and evaluative user research for B2B, enterprise, or technically complex software platforms.

• Experience building or scaling a research practice in a SaaS or product-led organization.

• Excellent working knowledge of UX research tools and methodologies across qualitative and quantitative methods (interviews, surveys, usability, card sorting, heuristic reviews, benchmarking).

• Portfolio or examples of past research work and impact, showing your ability to translate findings into meaningful product change.

• High comfort level with complex information architectures, data-driven interfaces, and research in highly regulated or secure industries.

• Proven people management and coaching skills, including hiring and developing early-in-career talent.

• Experience conducting research for fintech, fraud detection, analytics, or AI/ML-based software platforms.

• Strong storytelling chops backed by data and skilled in turning synthesis into narratives that influence action at both strategy and feature levels.

• Bachelor/Master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Design Research, Anthropology, or a related field. A Master’s or PhD in a relevant field is strongly preferred. 

Our Offer to You

• An inclusive culture strongly reflecting our core values:  Act Like an Owner, Delight Our Customers and Earn the Respect of Others.

• The opportunity to make an impact and develop professionally by leveraging your unique strengths and participating in valuable learning experiences.

• Highly competitive compensation, benefits and rewards programs that encourage you to bring your best every day and be recognized for doing so.

• An engaging, people-first work environment offering work/life balance, employee resource groups, and social events to promote interaction and camaraderie.

• The targeted base pay range for this role is: $151,000 to $236,000 with this range reflecting differences in candidate knowledge, skills and experience.
   

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