About Gusto

Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 100,000 businesses nationwide.

We reimagine payroll, benefits, HR, and personal finance by automating the most complicated, impersonal business tasks and making them simple, delightful, and human. We have ambitious plans to scale to millions of businesses while expanding the value that we bring to them, and we’re seeking a visionary UX Research leader to drive initiatives that span multiple time horizons to get us there.

Design and user experience is at the center of everything we do in Gusto and is one of our key differentiators. We are a customer-obsessed company, and we believe that everyone who is involved in product development should deeply understand the needs and experiences of our customers. As the Head of UX Research, you’ll have the unique opportunity to connect the business strategy and customer insights, define and assure best practices, and create exceptional products that our customers and internal teams will love and will set the bar for the industry. You will also work closely with our cross-functional leadership to amplify our customer centricity and evolve the business & product strategy for Gusto as a whole. 

If you are a builder of great products who thrives on empowering your team to make major business impact at a high-growth company, we would love to hear from you!

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Hire, lead, and pave paths for our diverse team of high-performing researchers and research operations to drive impact.
• Provide direction and vision for evolving the role of research in product development; identify and execute on opportunities to further increase quality, efficiency, and impact of Gusto’s collective research efforts.
• Develop strategic research roadmap to identify and answer the most critical questions about our customers in partnership with company leadership and cross-functional stakeholders. 
• Evaluate and experiment with new and emerging methods and technologies, and identify if and how to incorporate them into the team’s toolkit.
• Coach UX researchers and cross-functional partners as they craft their approach to the challenge at hand. Optimize for helping them deliver credible, actionable insights which drive confident, bold, customer-focused business & design decisions. 
• Scope projects & bandwidth required and help guide researchers to prioritize workstreams, creating space and resources for the team to pursue the highest-impact opportunities to move the needle for Gusto’s customers, teams, and the business.
• Strengthen and amplify Gusto’s customer-focused culture, and help bring the voice of the customer to the whole company.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 10+ years of hands-on user research experience, with 5+ years managing growing research teams.
• Expert knowledge about quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and deep experience working with large data sets.
• A proven track record of building repeatable, sustainable research processes that support operational excellence in rapidly scaling companies.
• Direct experience in leveraging research to drive strategy and design, by converting general business questions into meaningful research questions & empowering a team to uncover and inspire the company with the answers .
• Passionate about developing others, and growing people to their fullest potential, while building a world-class research team.
• Open to trying new ways of working and teaching the broader organization how to integrate research into our daily activities, so teams working on customer-facing products & services can learn the recommended ways to conduct their own studies and gain insights about their customers.
• Strong leadership and presentation skills representing UX Research and customer insights across the organization to the executive level.
• Genuine empathy for small business owners and employees and a deep desire to improve their lives.

Nice to have:

• Success with UX research in SaaS experience serving SMBs & regulated industries.
• Strong quantitative data analysis chops.
• Experience leading a distributed team across multiple locations. 

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.