Researcher & Design Strategist

Peer Insight is looking for a passionate and motivated Researcher & Design Strategist to join us in the new business building work we do. Our firm’s mission is to serve the growth ambitions of established organizations and their (current and/or future) stakeholders with new value-generating products and services beyond their core businesses. This is all about getting into the market to experiment, iterate, and validate solutions to real customer problems.

MORE ABOUT US

Peer Insight is a business-builder. Since 2012, we have collaborated on more than 75 innovation projects with Global 2000 companies and not-for-profits. In the process, we have been part of launching more than a dozen multimillion-dollar businesses. Our core ingredients, and what gets our team excited each day, are a powerful blend of entrepreneurship, corporate innovation, and human-centered design (HCD). Our firm offers the chance to work on multiple corporate- sponsored start-ups in an incubator environment with an incredible team. Our team comes from different backgrounds, but we are united by our mission and our Guiding Principles. We thrive on radical transparency, embrace the power of small teams, practice rigorous experimentation, and assume positive intent and generous collaboration.

Each project is staffed with one of our Partners, a Team Lead, and two or more Researcher & Design Strategists, with additional support from the broader team. This is a hands-on role, where you will roll up your sleeves and practice deep collaboration – in the market, with users, with colleagues and with client-partners.

THE ROLE OF A RESEARCHER & DESIGN STRATEGIST

Our human-centered design orientation applies inside the firm as well as out, so we are obsessed with finding and supporting the highest-quality talent for all of our work. This role is critical to the success of our projects and to the firm at large, so we’re hyper-focused on creating success in every direction.

Regardless of the phase of a project, the Researcher & Design Strategist is a highly engaged, collaborative role, where you will both lead and support the design, execution and analysis of a huge variety of market research and live experimentation – from desk research to interviews and ethnography, to ads and landing pages tests, to medium to high fidelity functional prototypes (and much much more; hopefully you’ll teach us some new techniques too).

We are targeting a Spring 2024 start date but are flexible.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design and execute primary and secondary research – identifying and prioritizing assumptions and defining a path to test them through user research and in-market experimentation
• Support and/or drive the early development of a new solution – identifying target users, defining key features, designing business models, managing prototype builds, and crafting go-to-market strategies
• Contribute to a practical plan for de-risking an opportunity – helping discern how best to deploy the limited resources (team and budget) available and then iterating that plan as we learn more from the market
• Ruthlessly prioritize and iterate (approach and/or solution) based on feedback from users
• Support communicating to key stakeholders in the process of venture building – conceptualize and oversee the delivery of assets and artifacts that bring a diverse group of stakeholders along for continued investment decisions

Requirements

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• 4+ years relevant experience across a combination of the following areas:
• research and human-centered design
• innovation/design consulting
• product strategy or product design / early prototyping
• corporate innovation strategy
• Well-versed in applying human-centered design principles to the research, development, and execution of new products and services
• Experience with activating and contributing to teams in dynamic (virtual and live) environments
• Comfort and courage with navigating the unknown through rigorous testing and iteration – we like to say, “You don’t know, but you know how to know”
• Ability to handle complexity – weighing a variety of competing factors to make sound decisions with imperfect and/or incomplete data
• We strive to recruit a group of unique individuals, but our team members tend to share these attributes: Curiosity | Perceptiveness | Optimism | Courage | Entrepreneurialism | Discernment | Humility
• This role will require occasional travel - for firm and/or client service activities (like research or workshops)

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

• You lead with genuine empathy – it’s not your ideas that drive you, it’s their problems
• You inspire people to work with you – you’re a top-notch collaborator
• You have a strong sense of ownership – you’re willing to do whatever it takes to serve the mission, the team and the customer
• You are focused on results and appreciate the entrepreneurial constraints of limited resources
• You respond well to complex situations, working with customers and partners to solve problems
• You move quickly and have the confidence to act decisively when needed
• You know what to measure, when, and how to communicate success/learnings to others who have not been in the trenches with you
• You have the ability to work with remote teams
• You appreciate the power of a diverse organization and contribute to the culture of co-creating impactful solutions
• You know that these problems require teams to solve them – there is no one right answer, and one brilliant brain is not enough to solve any of the problems we work on

Benefits

HOW YOU’LL GROW

We’ve found new members of our team grow quickly because of the varied and complex challenges we solve together. You’ll hone your problem solving toolkit by applying it across industries and within every phase of the innovation cycle – from opportunity discovery to needs finding, through product design, iteration and in-market pilot tests. We want every team member to grow at the pace that is comfortable to them, and as such the firm tends to promote on the spot as we observe individuals contributing at a higher level, rather than waiting for a development cycle to come back around. A researcher can grow from being an outstanding contributor, to being a leader of a project/venture, to owning greater client responsibility and/or internal responsibility. Every role at Peer Insight is hands-on and in contact with the work – even our partners are deeply embedded into project delivery – which allows us to be inspired by and to learn from one another each and every day.

• Salary range: $90K-$115K base salary with additional twice-a-year profit sharing bonuses and performance bonuses.
• Additional benefits: 3% 401k company match, exceptional health care, professional development and wellness budgets and more.