Senior Manager, Design Research

Overview

Senior Manager, Experience Research — Sam's Club

This range is provided by Sam's Club. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

$/yr - $/yr

At Sam’s Club, we’re committed to being the membership you love the most. The Sam's Club Experience Design team crafts compelling experiences wherever we meet our members and associates, from our clubs to their businesses, and to their homes. We deliver impact for the business through the web, apps, in-club experiences and associate-facing tools. In this role, we need your strategic Design Research expertise and leadership to shape, inform, and support key initiatives throughout the Sam’s Club organization while growing organizational empathy and research capability.

You will rely on your interpersonal strengths and your ability to lead with creativity, strategic and systems thinking. You are a right fit if you have experience managing, mentoring, and coaching a team of researchers in developing the art and science of research design and high-quality insight creation. You are a compelling storyteller and communicator, with the skillset of turning data and insights into a captivating narrative to guide decision makers and influence direction.

Senior Managers balance hands-on research with team leadership (approximately 35% practitioner / 65% manager) and are accountable for ensuring their team’s work drives meaningful value and measurable impact.

As a Senior Manager of Experience Research, you will lead researchers to deliver high-impact and actionable insights that shape a holistic experience strategy for our members and associates. You excel at turning complexity into clarity. You will facilitate workshops to help teams define opportunity areas, frame the right problem to solve, define research goals, select the right methodologies, make sense of the data, and translate findings into actionable-frameworks, narratives, and recommendations.

You will partner closely with interdisciplinary teams and business stakeholders to influence decisions, build aligned visions, and drive measurable outcomes. Your work will connect strategic opportunities, anticipating needs and aspirations of our associates and members to the creation and deployment of future-state experiences  are a great fit if you have a passion for applied research, blending qualitative and quantitative approaches to inform strategy across every phase of design, from discovery to optimization.

• Manage aspects of the employee lifecycle including talent acquisition, onboarding, development, and performance management.
• Provide leadership through mentoring and coaching a team of design researchers, ensuring methodological integrity and high-quality insights that drive business outcomes.
• Lead strategic research planning: identify gaps, frame opportunity areas and problem statements, define scope/objectives/success criteria, and choose effective methods.
• Develop inclusive, strategic research plans, recruitment approaches, guides, screeners, interview scripts, stimuli, and study logistics.
• Lead generative research to uncover motivations and attitudes across ecosystems; apply a broad range of methods (interviews, focus groups, surveys, qualitative/quantitative studies, field research, usability).
• Facilitate workshops, journey walkthroughs, and concept evaluations; translate findings into archetypes, journey maps, and actionable narratives.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to influence experience direction across omni-channel experiences (web, mobile, support, self-service, AI-driven flows).

• Min 2 years managing researchers as direct reports or leading a research team.
• Bachelor’s degree in HCI, Human Factors, UX, Behavioral Science, Information Science, Social Sciences, or related field + 8+ years of UX, CX, or Service Design Research experience; OR Master’s degree with 6+ years; OR Doctorate with 4+ years; OR equivalent practical experience.
• 3+ years designing and facilitating co-creation, ideation, and design-thinking workshops.
• 6+ years conducting qualitative research…