(USA) Senior Manager, Design Research

Position Summary...

Senior Manager, Design Research

At Sam’s Club, we’re committed to being the membership you love the most. The Sam's Club Experience Design team crafts compelling experiences wherever we meet our members and associates, from our clubs to their businesses, and to their homes. We deliver impact for the business through the web, apps, in-club experiences and associate-facing tools. In this role, we need your strategic Design Research expertise and leadership to shape, inform, and support key initiatives throughout the Sam’s Club organization while growing organizational empathy and research capability.

From day one, you will rely on your interpersonal strengths and your ability to lead with creativity, strategic and systems thinking. You are the right fit if you have experience managing, mentoring, and coaching a team of researchers in developing the art and science of research design and high-quality insight creation. You are a compelling storyteller and communicator, with the skillset of turning data and insights into a captivating narrative to guide decision makers and influence direction. Senior Managers balance hands-on research with team leadership (approximately 35% practitioner / 65% manager) and are accountable for ensuring their team’s work drives meaningful value and measurable impact.

What you'll do...

In This Role
As a Senior Manager of Design Research, you will lead researchers to deliver high-impact and actionable insights that shape a holistic experience strategy for our members and associates. You excel at turning complexity into clarity. You will facilitate workshops to help teams define opportunity areas, frame the right problem to solve, define research goals, select the right methodologies, make sense of the data, and translate findings into actionable-frameworks, narratives, and recommendations.

You will partner closely with interdisciplinary teams and business stakeholders to influence decisions, build aligned visions, and drive measurable outcomes. Your work will connect strategic opportunities, anticipating needs and aspirations of our associates and members to the creation and deployment of future-state experiences at scale. You are a great fit if you have a passion for applied research, blending qualitative and quantitative approaches to inform strategy across every phase of design, from discovery to optimization.
Manage a Team
·       Manage aspects of the employee lifecycle including talent acquisition, onboarding, development, and performance management
·       Provide leadership through mentoring and coaching a team of design researchers, assuming responsibility for methodological integrity, quality insights, and outputs that drive business outcomes.
Strategic Research Planning

• Use existing data and secondary research to identify research gaps and frame opportunity areas and problem statements
• Define the scope, objectives, and success criteria for research initiatives based on business needs, recommending the most effective methods
• Develop inclusive, strategic research plans, recruitment approaches, discussion guides, screeners, interview scripts and stimuli, and study logistics

Execution & Methodologies

• Lead generative research efforts to uncover associate and member motivations, behaviors, and attitudes across ecosystems
• Apply a broad range of research methods including interviews, focus groups, surveys, qualitative studies, quantitative analysis, field research, and usability methods
• Lead evaluative and continuous research as digital and physical experiences evolve from early prototypes to pilots and ultimately to scaled deployments
• Facilitate workshops, journey walkthroughs, and concept evaluations

Synthesis & Deliverables

• Facilitate collaborative synthesis with multidisciplinary teams and stakeholders as you uncover and make meaning of insights
• Translate findings into archetypes, personas, journey maps, opportunity frameworks, problem statements, and insights narratives
• Transform complex findings into clear, actionable stories that guide decisions and build alignment
• Use data, qualitative insights, and behavioral signals to inform prioritization and roadmap decisions

Stakeholder Collaboration & Influence

• Partner with cross-functional teams to define experience direction across omn