What is the role?

You will be a key member of Sidewalk’s Delve team, carrying out user-centered design research to help urban development teams discover the best possible neighborhood designs using machine learning. Delve is on a mission to empower real estate teams to design better and with less risk by weighing tradeoffs in program mix, financial outcomes, and quality of life factors (such as views, daylight, and walkability) to arrive at the best design strategies for a site. 

Our growing product team delivers intuitive, seamless experiences for real estate teams, and we start with users first. You will work closely with members of our design team and our cross-functional teams to:

• Design, execute, and analyze studies using methods such as ethnographic/field research, diary studies, surveys, user/usability testing (remote and in-person), benchmark studies, online A/B testing, and basic quantitative analytics.
• Provide deep insight and actionable recommendations to create best-in-class user experiences.
• Find creative and compelling ways to generate and share results and recommendations throughout our product organization.
• Influence product and service strategy, working closely with product managers, engineers, and subject-matter experts to determine product direction.
• Support facilitation of strategic workshops with diverse audiences that drive a deep and nuanced understanding of user needs, strategy, and priorities.

What we expect:

• Putting users first
• You have 6+ years of experience in product organizations, leading mixed-methods research through interviews, observations, surveys, and other quant-based methods.
• You have a degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, Anthropology, Human Factors, Design, or other UX-equivalent research experience.
• You are a proven leader and communicator; you are able to educate a larger organization about the value, need, and process around user research with ease.
• Bias towards action
• Scrappy and creative: as a first UX research hire dedicated to a product, we’ll lean on you to operationalize the discipline internally in a startup environment.
• Once you’ve sketched out an idea, you find the fastest path to gain traction and begin executing.
• You have a strong ability to create whatever assets are needed quickly, from screeners to discussion guides to reports.
• Know your tools: experience with recruitment tools like UserInterviews, usability tools like Usertesting.com, survey tools like Qualtrics, Airtable, and Typeform or comparable UXR tools.

• Solve problems, together
• External partnerships: you have experience and comfort in structuring and negotiating with consultants or vendors to get the work done. 
• Internal partnerships: you can manage up and across, working closely with our ops teams (Legal, Procurement, Finance) to project manage Research Ops as needed.
• You ask the hard questions and challenge assumptions to ensure that we’re solving the right problems.

• Passionate about cities
• Demonstrated curiosity for the urban environment and care deeply about improving the lives of people in cities through an affordability and sustainability lens.
• You’re excited about enterprise tools for those who build cities, and you have a point of view for how to best empower users with real-time and predictive data/insights.
• Bonus points
• Experience using statistics, experiment design, and data science to gain insight.

What you have to achieve:

• Within the first month, you’ve absorbed the research done thus far, both from our in-house design team and our research partners. You deeply understand the customers, users, and roadmap for the product and have identified the gaps where research can contribute.
• Within the first two months, you’ve completed at least one research study (could be a usability study, survey, or other), and helped to synthesize the results into actions for our product team. You’ve sketched a more detailed plan (why/what/how) for the next two quarters on the most important research questions the team needs to address in order to hit our goals.  
• By the end of month three, you’ve worked with Sales, Customer Success, Procurement, Legal, and Product to build a recruitment pipeline and strategy, so that a rolling research monthly cadence is set up like clockwork. 
• Beyond the first few months, you’ve set up product-specific processes that can help unlock additional learning opportunities for frontline team members that interact with users and customers on a daily basis (Sales, Customer Success). You’ve shared relevant tools and templates that can support the strengthening and upskilling of research practice across the Sidewalk organization.