Senior Manager, Research & User Intelligence

Senior Manager, Research & User Intelligence

Senior Manager, Research & User Intelligence (Individual contributor)

This is a Hybrid position, 3 days/wk onsite.

Summary:

Capital One’s Experience Design (XD) organization is focused on co-creating memorable, meaningful customer and associate experiences that build our brand with humanity and drive business advantage. As the Senior Manager of Research & User Intelligence for a product tower, you are responsible for accelerating learning velocity by defining and executing research programs that generate actionable insights to inform the creation of useful and usable solutions.

Role Expectations:

The XD Research organization is seeking a Senior Manager of Design Research who can enter complex product domains—ranging from deep technical infrastructure and data-heavy platforms to front-end consumer applications—and quickly anchor the product roadmap in human-centered insights. In this role, you are expected to provide a rigorous, behavioral lens to technically dense or abstract problem spaces by conducting multi-method research with diverse cohorts of internal associates, enterprise users, and retail customers. This is an individual contributor role that requires a mastery of human factors, digital product design, information architecture, interaction design principles, product development lifecycle, qualitative and quantitative research methods, data analysis and triangulation, user experience metrics, and research platforms.

The ideal candidate is a clarifier with deep experience navigating ambiguity, quickly building systemic mental models of new product spaces, and establishing research programs that scale. You possess a proactive, consultative approach to cross-functional partnerships, balancing deep expertise in qualitative and quantitative data triangulation with a fast-moving operational mindset.

Responsibilities:

• Optimize and Scale Cumulative User Intelligence: Plan and conduct connected studies and establish data acquisition mechanisms that contribute to a collective body of user intelligence that fuels product teams’ planning and decision-making, while maintaining a high degree of governance and risk compliance

• Prioritize and lead rapid testing within the product development lifecycle: Create and evolve research agents and research platforms to accelerate learning velocity: extracting insights from existing intelligence repositories, conducting rapid discovery, concept, content, and usability testing

• Manage and Maintain Continuous Discovery Programming: Drive collaboration with research ops to enable partner teams to access their users to maximize empathy and understanding

• Support UX Measurement and Hypothesis-driven Design: Partner with CX, data scientists, analysts, and designers to identify and track domain-specific UX metrics. Assist in developing mechanisms to collect/measure UX metrics, conduct analysis using UX and other metrics to identify critical correlations between user behavior and business success.

• Conduct and Socialize Data Triangulation & Synthesis: Utilize behavioral analytics, quantitative data, and qualitative insights to produce actionable insights. Establish channels to socialize learnings to stakeholders in order to drive impact.

Leadership Competencies

• Problem Solving: Designs scalable frameworks and vision-backed learning agendas to prioritize high-impact problems across multiple domains; leverages technical and data fluency to navigate complex trade-offs and drive innovative, customer-centric solutions that maximize business value

• Judgment: Prioritizes high-leverage opportunities and eliminates duplicative work to scale impact across the organization; guides teams through ambiguity with empathy while maintaining focus on clear business priorities and consistent delivery

• Influence: Acts as a trusted strategic advisor, leveraging deep expertise and cross-functional partnerships to influence senior-level decision-making and drive the adoption of human-centered strategies in service of high-stakes business outcomes

• Teamwork: Collaborates broadly, and contributes regularly to internal knowledge platforms and events; proactively and effectively aligns work to business needs, focusing on shared goals over their own agenda