Research Strategist

Consultant – Customer Research & Insights Strategist

Who you'll work with:
The Research & Insights practice at Slalom is a growing team of roughly 20 researchers spanning qualitative, quantitative, UX, and market research disciplines. We work directly with clients to uncover what their customers want, what their markets are doing, and what their data is saying, so that when organizations move, they move on something real.

We bring human craft and modern tools to every engagement. The result is research that does not stop at the finding, it follows through to the decision, the strategy, and the work that gets done.

The Research Strategist brings quantitative rigor and qualitative depth to client engagements, designing research that uncovers what customers actually think, do, and need, and translating those findings into strategies organizations can act on.

This role sits at the center of client delivery, owning the research design, leading the analysis, and shaping the so-what. Beyond the research, this person connects insight to decision, decision to strategy, and strategy to action, helping clients move forward with evidence behind them and confidence in front of them. A curiosity about AI in research and synthetic methods is part of how we expect to shape the future.

• Select and justify research methods across quantitative and qualitative approaches, with a clear rationale for why one method serves the objective better than another.
• Design survey instruments with rigorous attention to question architecture, scale selection, skip logic, and sample design to ensure findings are statistically credible and analytically useful.
• Define research questions, hypotheses, and success criteria at the outset of an engagement to keep the work anchored to business outcomes rather than research process.

• Design, field, and analyze surveys end-to-end, including segmentation, cross-tabs, and significance testing, translating statistical output into findings a business leader can act on.
• Design and lead qualitative fieldwork across focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic methods, bringing a point of view to what is heard, not just a record of it.
• Synthesize findings across methods into a single, cohesive insight narrative that integrates behavioral, attitudinal, and market data into a complete picture of the customer.
• Analyze qualitative data with rigor, identifying patterns and tensions in the data rather than simply surfacing themes that confirm the hypothesis.
• Know when the data is telling you something unexpected and have the analytical confidence to follow it, even when it complicates the story.

• Translate research findings into strategic recommendations that are specific, prioritized, and tied to a business outcome rather than a restatement of what the data said.
• Create customer-facing outputs including journey maps, experience diagnostics, and personas grounded in research evidence, then shape the strategic narratives that connect research to the decisions and investments that follow.
• Frame implications for different audiences, sharpening the so-what for an executive and the so-now-what for a product or delivery team.
• Manage client expectations around research scope, timeline, and findings, communicating proactively when something in the data or the process requires a change in direction.
• Hold a methodology position when challenged, articulating the rationale clearly.
• Collaborate across disciplines including design, data, strategy, and technology to ensure research findings connect to the broader engagement.
• Contribute to internal practice development through knowledge sharing, methodology documentation, and participation in R&I capability building.

• Strong quantitative experience: survey design, segmentation, regression, and significance testing.
• Mixed-methods fluency across qualitative and quantitative research design and execution.
• Ability to synthesize behavioral, attitudinal, and market data into a clear, structured point of…