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User Experience Research Director
Akamai
Cambridge, MA, United States
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About the Job
We are looking for a highly-motivated User Research Director to join our Product Experience Design team in Santa Clara, CA or Cambridge, MA. This role will be responsible for managing a User Experience Research practice, including maintaining best practices for user-centered design, building a research infrastructure and scaling the practice to enable teams to practice user-centered design and research methods.
The Director will focus on improving the overall Product Experience by conceptualizing, conducting, and socializing User Research initiatives (attitudinal and behavioral) that provide important user insights to inform product experience decisions.
The Director will interact and partner regularly with Akamai’s business units, Customer Experience team, the Global Services and Support team, and other stakeholders across multiple business units.
Competencies
Leadership: You are able inspire and lead teams with clear visions. You are experienced leading teams and hiring amazing talent. You are skilled at setting priorities, scaling for growth and elevating the overall impact of your team.
Mentorship: You enjoy teaching others how to empathize with users, how to identify patterns in user behavior and how to distill those findings into insights that drive action.
Wide and deep research expertise: You apply a broad research toolkit while sharing deep UX experience and expertise. You and your team perform much of the research remotely and in-the-field. You lead key projects and develop in-house capabilities (innovation efforts, usability, etc.).
Actionable insights focus: You are adept at uncovering deep and relevant insights, but don’t stop there – you ensure these are translated into actionable outcomes that affect the design of the product, whether through relevant recommendations or through leading ideation sessions.
Holistic and cross-functional approach: You build bridges across the organization to understand the business, bring context to the team and amplify the learnings to infuse the voice of the user into a culture that thrives on that understanding. You work closely with Customer Experience, Global Services, Product Management, Design, Engineering, Marketing and other groups.
Required qualifications
• Bachelor’s Degree in Human Factors, User Experience, Design or equivalent
• 10+ years of experience in UX research/user insights.
• 8+ years of hands-on expertise and passion for research and product innovation.
• 5+ years of experience working with large and disparate data sets (qualitative, quantitative, behavioral, secondary, etc.)
• 2+ years of experience in enterprise environments.
Desired qualifications
• Master’s Degree in Human Factors, User Experience, Design or equivalent
• Thrive on wanting to know why users act and feel the way they do, love sharing this understanding with others, and known for accurately predicting consumer behavior and reaction. You are an expert at understanding customer and user drivers and motivations. You boldly bring the voice of the customer/user into the room regardless of in a way that has a direct and immediate impact on the business, even when your points are controversial.
• Able to synthesize learnings from multiple sources into a clear and concise story (e.g. qualitative, quantitative, behavioral, secondary research), determining what’s important and distilling insights into actionable recommendations—often necessary to push teams beyond “analysis paralysis.”
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Can organize, clarify and communicate complex ideas quickly, succinctly and accurately. You have a quick intelligence and quickly respond to inquiries and questions.
• Creative. Demonstrated ability to think innovatively—connecting the dots where others cannot when it comes to consumers to create business building insights.
• Past experience in a culture that utilizes data in enterprise environments.
Other Information
• Is relocation available for this position: No
• Is US Citizenship required: No
• Is a Security Clearance Required: No
If yes, applicants selected will be subject to a government security investigation & must meet eligibility requirements for access to classified information.