Senior Research Strategist – Field Discovery & Insights

As a Senior Research Strategist and facilitator, the Field Insights drives insights that shape exceptional practice and advisor experiences that drive business outcomes. This role leads generative and formative research, synthesizes qualitative and quantitative data, and translates findings into actionable strategies across the full product lifecycle, with a primary focus on early discovery and definition. This role collaborates with cross-functional teams, advocates for user needs, and ensures solutions and roadmaps are grounded in and informed by validated insights.

Key Responsibilities

Facilitate Discovery Research

• Lead generative and formative research using interviews, workshops, design sprints, and other methods with internal experts and stakeholders, and technology end users in the field.
• Validate solution designs and facilitate stakeholder alignment.
• Develop current-state and point-of-arrival journey maps, service blueprints, and related people, process, and technology artifacts.

Analyze & Consult

• Collaborate with business partners, product owners, architects, and UX designers to design research strategies that support capability and product strategic planning and roadmap prioritization
• Collect, synthesize, and report qualitative and quantitative insights across the development lifecycle.
• Consolidate insights into actionable reports and integrate findings into Discovery artifacts.

Translate Insights into Action

• Support the software development lifecycle by addressing strategic research needs during design and agile development.
• Consult on measurement strategies to define experience-satisfaction metrics.
• Advocate for adoption principles during planning cycles. Support usability research as necessary.

Connect & Advocate

• Ensure strategies, roadmaps, and requirements are grounded in and supported by validated research and insights.
• Share findings across all levels of the organization, from implementation teams to senior leadership.
• Identify and recommend new research opportunities across product and capability teams.

Support Continuous Development

• Maintain strong business, channel, and product knowledge.
• Foster relationships with partners and stakeholders.
• Stay current on qualitative and quantitative research tools and techniques, and communicate their value to teams.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelors degree or equivalent years of experience.
• 7-10 years of relevant qualitative and quantitative research experience is required. 
• 5+ years of experience leading and facilitating workshops, 1:1 interviews, and group input sessions with internal and external stakeholders.
• Experience with design-thinking tools, exercises, frameworks, and methodologies.
• Professional experience focused on technology solutions such as applications, platforms, and other digital capabilities.
• Ability to think strategically, finding common themes in disparate bodies of data, and translating and applying them to variable bodies of work.
• Highly effective verbal and written communication skills; ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with varying levels of leadership.
• Demonstrated success working in a highly collaborative environment with strong ability to lead and influence.
• Experience creating and / or validating current-state and future-state artifacts such as journey maps, service blueprints, or other user-flow documentation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with the following research, design, and productivity tools and platforms preferred: Qualtrics, Marvin, Jira / Confluence, Figma / Figjam, PowerBI, Microsoft Office suite, including Copilot AI.
• Stakeholder input and alignment session facilitation.
• Self-directed and -supported project-planning / management skills.

Experience in one or more of the following settings preferred: 

• Financial services, healthcare, and / or other regulated or highly specialized domains.
• B2B, franchise, and / or multichannel distribution / go-to-market system
• Agency or consulting environments.

About Our Company
We’re a diversified financial services leader with more than $1.5 trillion in assets under management, administration and advisement as of 2024. With our team of more than 20,000 people in 20 countries, we advise, manage and protect assets and income of more than 3.5 million individual, small business and institutional clients. We are a longstanding leader in financial planning and advice, a global asset manager and an insur