Lead UX Researcher

Forge is looking for a skilled Lead UX Researcher to help our Design and Product teams discover needs, understand behaviors & pain points, identify opportunity areas, and validate solutions for serving our diverse customer communities: Startup employee-shareholders, individual and institutional investors, and founders and company leadership.  You’ll do this as a core member of our Design team, partnering with designers, product managers, analytics team members, and other business stakeholders to identify learning objectives and conduct studies across the end-to-end journeys of our customers. Through a collaborative approach and effective storytelling, you will produce insights embodied in artifacts that build customer empathy and drive decision-making, at both a product- and business-strategy level.

• Build relationships with stakeholders across the company (e.g., product, marketing, data , business operations) to assess and prioritize research needs and create a learning agenda around our customer segments, product experiences, and product strategies
• Design and implement processes for research to increase user empathy and engage stakeholders so they can see/understand firsthand our end-to-end user journeys and how they engage with our products and services
• Design and lead studies across the entire product lifecycle, partnering with Design and Product to prioritize changes that improve user engagement and product usage. Specific needs include:
• Work closely with Design and Product team members and leadership to define learning objectives and design appropriate research protocols for addressing them
• Use multiple research methods such as remote interviews, usability tests, expert reviews, card sorting, and surveys and introduction of new methodologies to provide richer insights
• Synthesize and communicate recommendations to cross functional stakeholders across the organization through artifacts and collaborative workshops
• Produce dynamic reports and engaging artifacts (i.e. videos and other storytelling pieces) that communicate actionable insights, informing product and design decisions
• Leverage business intelligence and usage analytics to advance our understanding of our customers
• Help maintain a shared repository of research insights that are easy to find, understand, and build upon
• Provide mentorship to cross-functional partners on best research practices
• Grow and develop our research practice, including defining tools/services and documentation of our research processes

• 5-10+ years of experience planning and executing effective qualitative user research studies using a variety of methods and frameworks, such as contextual inquiries, personas, user journeys, and usability studies (primarily conducted remotely)
• Comfort with quantitative research methods and specifically survey design/writing
• Skilled at designing and managing the end-to-end research process, with an ability to adapt the approach to the needs and constraints of the business
• Experience serving as a skilled partner to Design, Product & Engineering teams, with an ability to design and facilitate cross-functional team and executive workshops/work sessions for research planning, read-outs, and strategy development
• Expert at driving synthesis that translates into relevant insights and opportunity areas
• Outstanding written communication skills with a clear, concise, and compelling communication style that instills confidence in your decisions and recommendations
• Ability to demonstrate ‘actionability’ of research insights and artifacts, showing how your past work has enabled decision-making and business impact
• Undergraduate degree or commensurate experience in Design, Human Factors/HCI, Psychology/Behavioral Sciences, or related fields
• Experience at high-growth startups
• Experience in B2B and financial services
• Experience with our key Product and Design tools, especially Atlassian and Figma
• Must be able to sit and/or stand for long periods of time in an office setting or in home office setting while working