Senior Manager, Insights - VAL/LoR

Senior Manager, Publishing Insights (VALORANT and Legends of Runeterra)

At Riot, we deliver unforgettable gaming, esports, and entertainment experiences to our fans around the world. Publishing is how we connect with those players, and Publishing teams focus on creating harmonized, holistic experiences around and across our entire product portfolio. Core capabilities include marketing, strategy, commercial partnerships, community, player support, localization, and cross-product experiences.

Publishing Insights is a team of business strategists and researchers that sits within Publishing Strategy & Operations, focused on deepening Riot’s understanding of how to connect with players and fans. As Sr. Manager, Insights on this team, you will serve as the voice of our players and fans in critical and complex business discussions. You will work across the entire organization to conduct studies and lead strategic projects that inform Publishing tactics, systems, and experiences with a focus on VALORANT and Legends of Runeterra. 

Your strong background in insights, research, and audience strategy will ensure that you're an advocate for fans and can provide strategic guidance about their wants, needs, and behaviors. You will lead a pod of researchers and analysts to run research and reporting across a range of methods and capabilities, including market analysis, player surveys, focus groups, segmentation models, and more. You will report directly to the Head of Publishing Insights.

Responsibilities:

Audience Research and Development

• Partner closely with the heads of Publishing’s Product and Brand teams to shape respective Publishing audience strategies for VALORANT and Legends of Runeterra through research into Riot’s players, fans, and marketplace, including audience identification, analysis, and prioritization 
• Work with Publishing leadership to determine research needs, create research studies using the appropriate methodologies to meet those needs, and present results back to leadership
• Grow our knowledge of audience motivations, behaviors, and demographics outside of our gaming products through qualitative and quantitative research
• Partner with Product teams to design and run multi-factor audience segmentation and prioritize Publishing’s audience targets

Capability Development

• Create and lead regular collaboration audience strategy and insights rituals (e.g., working sessions, knowledge sharing, insights training, etc.)
• Partner with other data and insights teams across Riot to design hypothesis-backed experiments that measure the attributable impact of Publishing activities on business performance metrics
• Partner cross-functionally with Business Intelligence and data teams to analyze and visualize research findings and reports
• Oversee creation and delivery of weekly, monthly, and quarterly performance reports

Team Management

• Lead and grow a pod of 2-3 researchers and analysts that can deliver insights and improve the performance of our product
• Manage 3rd party research vendor projects, timelines, markets, budgets, and incorporating findings into actions that can be applied to our roadmap
• Support the professional development of senior analysts and researchers in their craft, provide performance management, and council on career growth

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years (or 6+ years with an advanced degree) experience in consumer insights, research, business strategy, management consulting, product management, or related experience
• 3+ years experience directly managing a team
• Professional experience implementing qualitative and quantitative research methods, including interviews or ethnography, hypothesis generation, survey design, sampling methods, fielding, data cleaning, analysis, and insights presentation
• Ability to develop strong, open, and collaborative working relationships with peers and senior leaders 

Desired Qualifications:

• Graduate degree or meaningful work experience in consumer insights, research, or audience strategy
• Proficiency with statistical tools (SPSS, R, etc.)
• Applied experience with data analysis of research datasets, such as clustering analysis (k-means or latent class), basic regressions, or similar
• Experience working with common self-serve insights and data platforms, such as AppAnnie, GlobalWebIndex, NewZoo, NPD, or YouGov
• Experience working with global teams across diverse cultures
• Deep knowledge of - or professional experience in - gaming industry

Our Perks:

Riot has a focus on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy, in addition to other perks such as flexible