Senior Design Researcher

Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive. 

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

At Xero, we’re here to make running a business beautiful. By making small businesses more efficient every day, connecting them with big business technology and empowering a community behind them, their potential is limitless. When that happens, we’re not only helping small businesses, we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.

How You'll Make Impact:

• • As a Senior Design Researcher you will confidently run and lead large, complex research projects across a range of quantitative and qualitative methods and techniques. You will conduct research activities across a range of methods, techniques and complexity of studies including both evaluative and generative, with especially strong skills in quantitative research. 
  • Your ability to synthesize complex data into impactful narratives and confident presentations will drive actionable recommendations for both product teams and executive leadership, and help drive connections between studies and stages of the customer journey.

What You'll Do:

• • Lead generative and evaluative studies independently, using a range of methods and techniques. You'll be data obsessed, specialising in gathering and analysing quantitative data to measure and quantify the user experience:
  • Plan research studies - run the logistics of a research study from recruitment, scheduling, and organising note takers and observers.
  • Desk research - work with researchers and designers to analyse relevant inputs such as research and data insights, product strategy and roadmap, technical environment and constraints. Help teams understand all of the previous and related data they can use to understand their space.
  • Facilitate research sessions - run professional sessions to maximise unbiased observations, while ensuring comfort of the participant and ethical practices.
  • Conduct different types of research - run research studies with a variety of methods for a variety of purposes e.g. surveys, diary studies, unmoderated tests, etc.
  • Measure user experience - take ownership of devising methods to measure the user experience within our products.
  • Drive quantitative research - design and implement investigative quantitative studies with a high degree of complexity and robustness to inform product decisions.
  • Analyze data from research studies - synthesise and make sense of the data, translating it into comprehensible and significant findings and insights for the team to engage with.
  • Report actionable insights - structure your findings and insights so they are actionable and help the Pod figure out how to move forward with those in mind.
  • Research with integrity - apply research ethics and inclusivity by default through following standards.
  • Link up with other research - connect insights from your study to previous research studies including those across portfolios, product data, Voice of the customer / marketing research, support tickets, and other reliable sources of information.
  • Communicate effectively - present and communicate research to a range of different audiences, with a focus on leadership, to make it easy for audiences to action insights.
  • Collaborate with designers and product teams – challenging assumptions and 'pre-set' thinking around solutions, agreeing the purpose, principles and vision.
  • Consider bias throughout the project - recognise it, minimise it where possible and call it out when it impacts insights.
  • Close out projects - follow all relevant close out processes including sharing results, ensuring data obligations are met, and reflecting on the projects. Helping other team members and mentoring them on the value of this practice.
  • Find connections - look for ways to explore how research findings impact other product portfolios in order to connect customer journeys.

Working with Cross-Functional teams:

• • Partner with Design and Product leaders to identify research studies that support them to understand their customers and improve their products. Collaborate on interpretations alongside designers so that we maximise their learnings from the research.
  • Contribute to helping others work with your research and previous reports by supporting teams to balance multiple insights to make good product decisions.
  • List and champion collaborations with cross functional teams to ensure research addresses needs/hypothesis/assumptions from a variety of standpoints.
  • Lead facilitation of cross functional team workshops, to bring everyone together at key points in the process and around key decisions.
  • Lead forming Partnerships with pods of PO’s, PM’s, Developers, strategists, designers, and product marketers during research to help them see the user context of their work.
  • Contribute to growing UX capability in pods by working with individuals and teams to improve their understanding of research and grow their participation in research activities.
  • Take the lead in working directly with product peers and strategy peers to define problems and direction, while building a good foundation of trust.

Practice Improvement:

• • Identify ways to improve our research practice. Lead practice improvement initiatives - test ideas, share challenges and build the quality of our practice.
  • Mentor and support researchers in utilizing mixed-methods approaches, including methods such as conjoint analysis, experimental design, cognitive testing, competitive analysis, max diff, feature prioritization.
  • Contribute to other researchers skills by working with them often so you can learn and pass on your expertise to others by collaboration, and mentoring.
  • Contribute to initiatives for practice improvement alongside product work. Work with others in the team to make sure we as a team are operating efficiently and to the best standard we can.
  • Research ops improvements with the operations team to ensure the process and systems we rely on are working for our team.

Leadership:

• • We believe leadership is part of everyone's role, ensuring that you are emulating Xero's values and the values of the research team. Support other less experienced researchers to grow their skills.
  • Take a growth, performance, wellbeing perspective on your work. With your fellow researchers, you’ll take the time to share learnings and mentor more junior researchers on the team.
  • Work with research and product peers to plan research activities, and contributing to capacity planning.
  • Growing your skills in working with other researchers to ensure they deliver high quality outputs in a timely, efficient way to meet business objectives.

What Success Looks Like:

• • You’re delivering on medium to larger research on schedule against agreed deadlines, to the highest quality standards.
  • You're collaborating, contributing and leading efforts with the Design, Product, and Development teams you work with.
  • You are actively contributing to practice and growth activities within the research team.

Why Xero? 
Offering very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays), dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as an Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family, free medical insurance, wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.

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