Associate Manager Product Research

The role:

We’re hiring an Associate Manager, Product Research to lead a high-impact research practice across digital product strategy, fintech and SaaS consulting engagements. This is a player/coach role: you’ll personally drive end-to-end research on priority initiatives while managing and developing researchers to elevate craft, velocity, and business impact. You’ll connect customer truth to product strategy through design thinking, psychology of interaction design, strategic foresight, and rigorous brand + market research—and you’ll bring an experimentation mindset to responsibly orchestrate AI tools that increase research efficiency without compromising rigor, privacy, or quality.

What you’ll do: 

• Set research strategy for a product domain and/or client portfolio, aligning the research roadmap to business goals, product outcomes, and customer value.
• Deliver decision-ready insights by executing mixed-method and multi-method research across discovery and delivery (primary + secondary and generative + evaluative), balancing rigor vs. speed appropriately.
• Turn insights into action: synthesize findings into clear recommendations, opportunity sizing, and tradeoffs that shape product direction, experience strategy, and go-to-market.
• Apply design thinking + interaction psychology (JTBD, mental models, behavioural design, decision-making, trust/ethics) to frame problems, design studies, interpret behavior, and de-risk product bets through rapid learning loops.
• Facilitate cross-functional alignment through workshops (research and design sprints, prioritization, and decision-making) with Product, Design, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, and client stakeholders.
• Integrate strategic foresight + market intelligence by using horizon scanning, STEEP/PESTLE, scenario planning, and backcasting—plus brand/market research and competitive benchmarking—to inform multi-horizon strategy and differentiation.
• Scale research impact and efficiency by managing and coaching researchers and UX designers, developing research ops and standards, and orchestrating AI-enabled workflows (with responsible guardrails) to accelerate synthesis, analysis, and insight reuse while tracking measurable outcomes.

What you’ll need:

• 6+ years in product and UX research (or equivalent applied research), with demonstrable impact on product decisions and business outcomes.
• 1+ year people management or formal team leadership experience (required): coaching, feedback, performance support, and stakeholder leadership.
  Experience in fintech and SaaS consulting environments, including ambiguity, multiple stakeholders, and fast iteration cycles.
• Strong fluency in design thinking and facilitation, with evidence of accelerating alignment and de-risking decisions through rapid learning loops.
• Practical application of strategic foresight to inform strategy, roadmap options, and future-state narratives.
• Demonstrated ability to lead brand/market research and translate findings into positioning, messaging, and differentiation.
• An experimentation mindset and experience orchestrating AI tools to scale research efficiency while maintaining rigor, accuracy, and integrity.
• Exceptional time management skills with the proven ability to manage multiple priorities and work in a fast-paced environment.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills are required to answer questions and communicate issues clearly & concisely to associates, members, and management.
• Ability to react to change quickly and implement new processes & procedures.
• Work independently with little or no supervision.
• Professional demeanor and excellent work habits are essential.

Nice to have:

• Experience with regulated product domains (payments, lending, identity, risk/fraud, banking platforms).
• Exposure to behavioral economics, service design, or decision science.
• Experience working with UX designers and Figma tools.