User Research Practice Leader

Company Description

AbbVie's mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines and solutions that solve serious health issues today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow. We strive to have a remarkable impact on people's lives across several key therapeutic areas – immunology, oncology, neuroscience, and eye care – and products and services in our Allergan Aesthetics portfolio. For more information about AbbVie, please visit us at www.abbvie.com. Follow @abbvie on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. 

Job Description

The AbbVie Combination Product Development (CPD) function provides design and development expertise to enable drug delivery systems for AbbVie products. The Human Factors (HF) Center of Excellence within CPD manages the user interface design process and executes usability assessments required to support the successful submission of AbbVie products. Early-stage user research is imperative to inform the user interface design process.

We are looking for an individual with academic training and professional experience in early-stage user research to lead the User Research practice within the Human Factors Center of Excellence.

Overview of Position:

This role is intended to establish and grow a user research practice within the Human Factors Center of Excellence. This individual will be responsible for anticipating and identifying user research needs related to exploration and feasibility assessment of early-stage device technologies, as well as managing the execution of identified research with third-party research suppliers. This individual will be expected to communicate research in an actionable manner to CPD partners and stakeholders and to maintain AbbVie’s organizational understanding of its users, their use environments, and associated user tasks in a way that is accessible to product development teams. While the position is considered a leadership position (i.e., practice leader), it does not involve direct people management.

The individual will perform the following functions in partnership with internal colleagues and/or third-party HF firms:

• Identify user research needs and opportunities through regular touchpoints with internal stakeholders
• Establish contracts with third-party research firms to conduct user research, suc