Director, Consumer Insights & Innovation

Who We Are:
At Brooks, we believe a run can change a day, a life, the world. Everyone who works here is a key part of our obsession to make the best running gear on the planet. We want our business — which also happens to be our passion — to be a place where everyone feels welcome and comfortable being themselves. Our company culture defines us, bonds us together, and drives our success. We live this culture daily through our brand values: Runner First, Word is Bond, Champion Heart, There is no “I” in Run, and Keep Moving. This means we always solve for the runner, do what we say we will, give it our all, are generous with our humanity, and find a way to keep moving every day, because joy is kinetic. 
Are you ready to help create something extraordinary?
Your Job:
The Run-Sight Lab (RSL) is the Consumer Insights 'engine’ of Brooks. The team applies design thinking and a mixed-method research approach to unlock a deep understanding of the key wants and needs of all who run and are active. That understanding is used to anticipate future needs of consumers, empower internal teams with deep insights and recommendations to transform how we create innovative products and strategies.  As the Director, Run-Sights Lab, you will lead and manage the RSL, including Design Research, Qualitative Research, Quantitative Research and Program Management teams along the insight journey harnessing collective wisdom and perspective to uncover the most meaningful consumer insights. You’ll oversee all research and consumer innovation projects and collaborate cross-functionally with other departments and leaders throughout the organization to determine the enterprise consumer research needs and prioritization.  You will own the development of a 3-year research roadmap and vision that articulates the strategy (including RSL capabilities) that will bring us closer to our consumers, uncover more meaningful insights, and translate them into more actionable outcomes and initiatives.
You and your team will curate travel to key global markets to conduct deep empathy and ethnography research with consumers in their environment and explore and utilize innovative methods and tools to facilitate effective research with those who are active in virtual environments. Through their eyes you will uncover key motivations, aspirations, challenges, and triumphs along their fitness journey. Armed with these powerful insights you will empower your teams to dream big and generate game-changing ideas that will make their journey better than it is today. You will utilize creative synthesis techniques to distill ideas into the most impactful propositions that can be prototyped. You will create collaborative environments where teams can be fearless to build, test and learn quickly as they refine the prototypes into game changing concepts for the brand to bring to consumers. You will cultivate relationships and conversations with other leaders across the company to understand their consumer and business challenges that can be explored and solved through insights-based research. Outside the walls of Brooks, you’ll be the external face of our consumer research, spreading and evangelizing our insights outside of our walls to our partners in the industry.
As the RSL Team continues to mature, you’ll oversee the development and expansion of RSL program management practice, processes, and tools, to accelerate the work and capabilities of the team. This includes standing up a new consumer innovation practice that unlocks insights to transform how we use them to create game-changing outcomes that impact consumers and the way they think, feel, and interact with the brand.

Your Responsibilities:

• Innovative Thinking Practice
• Bring an innovation spirit to our research process by pushing our techniques, approach, and research design to the next level
• Champion innovating for the consumer across the company by leveraging design thinking to build a new framework for identifying innovation concepts and a process the vet and execute them. In year-one in role, stand-up a new research pod to test out the framework and develop plan to support three to ten-year growth drives and unlock innovation across long-term horizon
• Lead cross-functional teams through the consumer innovation process, teaching and modeling behaviors that produce the desired result in each phase with simultaneously challenging norms and expectations
• Create and maintain an environment of harnessing collective wisdom by facilitating productive discussion with multiple points of view, and perspectives. Championing looking at things through different lenses that push the work and conversations to new territories


• Strategy & Planning
• Lead development of 3-year Strategic Roadmap that articulates the long-term vision for the Run-Sight Lab, including project strategy, capabilities, innovation roadmaps and