Design Research Lead

Each year, sales reps around the world collectively earn over $300 billion in commissions for their efforts. Despite this scale, calculating, communicating and reporting on commissions is a painful challenge for the majority of companies. Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) software seeks to solve this problem, but legacy ICM vendors have failed to deliver on their promises. Business and sales teams remain frustrated with their sales comp programs.

Performio is a modern ICM company that is changing this story. Founded as a scrappy, bootstrapped start-up over 15 years ago in Melbourne, Australia, we are now a mature, growth stage company with teams all over the world—North America, Australia, India and soon, Europe. We have a fresh round of capital to accelerate our efforts to reinvent this category. We have customers in over 25 industries globally that use and love our product, including well-known brands like Johnson & Johnson, Optus and REA Group.

Our product development team—Product, Design and Engineering—are split across Australia and India. This role sits within our growing Experience Design team, and reports directly to the Director of Experience Design.

**The opportunity**

As the first member of our research practice, you will lead and deepen our efforts to understand our customers. You will be a hands-on practitioner, partnering with peers in customer-facing teams to develop enduring relationships with our customers all around the world and build a rich understanding of their needs, pain points, motivations and behaviours. A natural storyteller, you will have a knack for distilling data into compelling artefacts that inspire action.

We have 3 key short-term goals for this role:

- Make sense of the qualitative data we’ve already collected. Identify patterns, draw out themes and insights to inform our current product direction and shape additional hypotheses.
- Plan and execute generative research into the foundation of our domain—commission plans. Plans are an expression of the behaviour that a business is looking to incentivise. They outline who gets paid for what—and every company does it differently.
- Guide teams on concept validation and experiment setup and evaluation. Help them tease out the metrics that matter and design tests that will inform whether we pivot, perish or persevere with our current ideas.

Beyond this, we’ll look to you to define all aspects of our research practice, including tools, methods and processes—and, down the track, to hire a team, if people leadership is a career goal. You will be a partner, mentor and guide to our Designers and Product Managers, enabling them to conduct their own research effectively and with confidence—so you can focus on the big questions. You have an interest in sharing your learnings and bringing people into your process. You thrive on the messiness inherent in product development, are comfortable with ambiguity and have a desire to actively contribute to our product strategy.

**What you’ll be doing**
- **Leading qualitative research efforts.** Drive our product strategy forward through generative, formative and summative research (including interviews, surveys, controlled experiments, concept testing and usability studies).
- **Translating findings into actionable insights. **Distil findings from a range of sources into clear, compelling and novel artefacts that build empathy and understanding.
- **Mentoring, guiding and advising. **Share your deep expertise with peers in Design and Product, enabling them to conduct their own research with appropriate rigour.
- **Building our research practice. **Recommend an appropriate suite of research tools, create our first insight repository and develop processes that enable us to scale.
- **Pairing quantitative data with qualitative insight**. Partner with Product to make sense of and bring meaning to quantitative data—bring the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’.
- **Measuring success of product initiatives.** Evaluate whether our product changes have the intended impact by recommending appropriate metrics (e.g. UMUX)
- **Developing relationships. **Partner with customer-facing teams, including Customer Success, Services and Sales to build enduring customer relationships.

**Requirements**:
**What we’re looking for**
- Significant demonstrated experience defining and leading qualitative research efforts independently
- A toolkit of qualitative research techniques
- Proven ability to make sense of complex domains and extract actionable insights
- Experience in a B2B context, e.g. exposure to Customer Advisory Boards, etc.
- Innate curiosity coupled with the ability to persuade and influence
- Compelling storytelling—and the artefacts to back it up
- Familiarity with common usability metrics (e.g. SUS, UMUX, SEQ)
- Desire to challenge the status quo and maturity to know when to compromise
- Respect for and ability to collaborate well with team members from all disciplin