Experience Research Manager

Have you ever tried to hire a plumber? How about a house cleaner? If you have, chances are it took you way longer than it should. In the era of instant-everything, you shouldn't have to waste an entire afternoon researching, calling and vetting local service professionals whenever you need one. The market for hiring them is huge - $1 trillion in the US alone - but the process is inefficient and largely offline.

Thumbtack is transforming this experience end-to-end, building a marketplace that matches millions of people with local pros for almost any project. In making these connections, not only do our customers get more done every day, our pros are able to grow their businesses and make a living doing what they're great at.

These customers and pros come from all walks of life and every county in the country. We want our team to reflect that. If you come from an underrepresented background in tech, we strongly encourage you to apply. We challenge ourselves every day to make this a place where you can thrive just the way you are, so we can build a product that does the same for our customers and pros.

About Research & Design At Thumbtack

We're a tight-knit and highly-collaborative team of designers, researchers, and product writers working closely with engineers and product managers to discover, validate, and iterate on well-crafted user experiences that are innovative, engaging, and delightful. We collaborate regularly through design critiques, work sessions, and presentations to inspire and inform the direction of the product and company as a whole.

About You

You are passionate about developing empathy for our users, both our customers and our small business owners/professionals (Pros), and delivering insights that help us create experiences that fulfill their needs. You're an experienced manager with several years of leadership and cross-functional collaboration experience. You're a great communicator and storyteller, and can help product teams better understand and advocate for their users. Your focus is on qualitative research methodologies, but you also have a working knowledge of quantitative methodologies.

Customers and pros come from all walks of life and every zip code in the country. We want our team to reflect that. If you come from an underrepresented background in tech, we strongly encourage you to apply. We challenge ourselves every day to make this a place where you can thrive just the way you are, so we can build a product that does the same for our customers and pros.

About The Role

The Experience Research Manager will lead a rigorous research practice within the Customer side of the marketplace. You will be directly responsible for a core team of researchers, both managing its growth and impact on key projects and initiatives. Experience Researchers at Thumbtack are embedded within product teams and serve as advocates for the needs of customers and pros alike. You will be responsible for scoping, managing, and executing research projects (often with overlapping timelines) and providing insights that will drive key product decisions. You would be focused on:

• Leadership

• Manage and grow a team of researchers across multiple research disciplines and backgrounds
• Articulate strong vision and identify impactful insights and opportunities to design and product leadership while being an advocate for the role research plays in product development
• Work across company leadership to establish how the entire company should engage with research, including establishing processes, trainings, and best-practices.
• Mentor members of the Experience Research team by providing the 1-1 coaching that individuals require to be successful.
• Guide individual team members' research efforts as well as taking on individual projects and conducting hands-on research if needed.

• Collaboration & Communication

• Collaborate closely as a trusted, strategic partner with a wide variety of cross-functional teams (product designers, product writers, product managers, engineers, analytics, data science, marketing, and other senior stakeholders) to identify and prioritize research opportunities in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment.
• Find creative and compelling ways to present and evangelize research across the company to cultivate a highly informed, more effective, and more empathetic organization
• Synthesize user feedback to generate insights and provide timely, clear and concise product and design recommendations.
• Share research findings with functional teams and the company at-large by creating and distributing compelling, impactful reports, and presentations.

• Process & Methodologies

• Apply a pragmatic, structured approach to research while understanding and incorporating complex technical and business requirements into research priorities
• Determine the best approaches and methodologies to apply to company priorities, from strategic discovery research to tactical evaluations of prototypes and design explorations
• Work collaboratively within the Research team and across Analytics and Data Science to assess larger user trends and determine strategies for further investigation and/or synthesis
• Evolve and optimize the process for participant recruitment and any other research coordination tasks
• Balance the trade-offs between scrappiness and rigor

Must-Have Qualifications

If you don't think you meet all of the criteria below but still are interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we're looking for someone excited to join the team.

• 2-3+ years of experience managing high-performing UX researchers
• 3-5+ years in applied UX research in fast-­paced, consumer-facing product organizations
• Demonstrated success translating and influencing product and design decisions based on research insights with key company stakeholders
• Strong understanding of strengths and shortcomings of various qualitative and quantitative research methods, including when and how to apply them during product phases
• Excellent knowledge of research principles, experiment design & facilitation, and using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methodologies that are appropriate for each project
• BA/BS in Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, Experimental Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Information Science, Computer Science, related fields, or equivalent practical experience
• Excellent interpersonal, communication, negotiation, and collaboration skills

Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• MA/MS/PhD in one of the previously mentioned academic fields
• Experience coding, writing SQL queries, Python, or statistical analysis
• Experience collecting and analyzing user behavior through server logs, unmoderated experiments (A/B testing), benchmark studies, in-person studies, remote studies, accessibility studies, and surveys
• Experience using a variety of research tools (such as Qualtrics, UserTesting.com, Optimizely, Ethnio) and familiarity with recruiting and analytics suites

More About Us

Thumbtack is a local services marketplace - one of the largest in the U.S. - that helps millions of people hire local professionals. With hundreds of unique service categories, customers can find a Thumbtack pro for almost anything: landscapers, electricians, personal trainers, even math tutors. And in making these connections, we empower local pros too. Helping them get new customers and make a living doing what they're great at.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in San Francisco, Thumbtack is backed by over $400 million in investment from Sequoia Capital, CapitalG, Tiger Global Management, Javelin Investment Partners and Baillie Gifford.

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• Virtual first is here to stay

Thumbtack is a virtual-first company, meaning you can live and work from any one of our approved locations across the United States, Ontario or the Philippines. When it is safe to gather, we will begin to host in-person events on a regular basis. Remote employees will be expected to travel occasionally for these events to a Thumbtack library or offsite team-building location. Additionally, employees in the San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Toronto and Manila areas will have opt-in access to communal workspace at one of our Thumbtack libraries.

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Thumbtack embraces diversity. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and do not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, color, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, citizenship, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

If you are a California resident, please review information regarding your rights under the California Consumer Privacy Policy Act contained in Thumbtack's Privacy policy available at https://www.thumbtack.com/privacy/.