Senior Researcher - Market Research / Design Strategy
Waymo is the self-driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to move around. Building on software and sensor technology developed at Google, Waymo is now launching the world’s first fully self-driving transportation service that will take members of the public from A to B at the touch of a button.
Waymo takes an integrated approach to building the world’s first self-driving car, with researchers, product managers, and technical program managers working side by side. We seek to understand the needs of our users and the opportunities of the technology to ensure we build the best product. From self driving behavior to user interfaces, we work to inspire the product vision and then make it a reality.
We are seeking a research inspired design strategist who has an impressive portfolio of service design work. You are a big picture thinker and masterful storyteller who can help to cut across research questions and initiatives and generate salient impactful strategies. We are thinking end-to-end about UX and developing frameworks that inspire work across the product organization. In this role you will help us to ask new strategic questions, identify areas of inquiry, run strategic research programs, develop product strategy frameworks, system and stakeholder maps, conceptual frameworks, and service blueprints. You will drive cross functional collaboration to answer questions about product-market-fit.
In this Market Research/Design Strategy role you'll:
- Run collaborative cross-functional strategic market research programs from end-to-end leveraging methodologies to suit the question - ethnography, surveys, benchmark studies, experiments, and co-creation exercises
- Drive change by translating research insights into persuasive narratives that inspire innovative solutions and inform key designs and decisions
- Develop concise, visually compelling stories that distill brand and service strategies in inspiring presentations, maps, frameworks, and strategies
- Craft and champion actionable recommendations to integrate with stakeholder workflows and improve operations, processes, and service
- Understand and translate complex technical and business needs into insights and action plans
- Develop highly visual frameworks, maps, and conceptual models to articulate complex ideas in intuitive strategic presentations
At minimum we'd like you to have:
- BA/BS degree in Design Research, Design Strategy, Human Computer Interaction, Brand Design, or other related social science fields or equivalent practical experience
- 7+ years industry experience conducting user research, design research, design strategy, ethnographic, and/or market research
It's preferred if you have:
- Portfolio of work strongly preferred
- M.A/M.S./Ph.D. (in progress or completed) in Design, Social Sciences, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), or other field
- Experience leveraging a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods and analysis techniques in highly diverse disciplinary environments
- Dexterity to work on both big picture and nuanced user experience questions from customer facing products to internal tools for engineering
- Research experience specifically focused on transportation as a service or mobility at a technology company
- Proven ability to manage large-scale projects across a diverse set of stakeholders, launch and scale successful consumer products or services