UX Research Manager | Zurich, Switzerland

Overview

Answer Lab is a leading independent user-experience (UX) research firm founded in 2004, helping enterprise product teams scale user research and turn customer insights into measurable product and business outcomes. The company serves major global clients and offers services across usability testing, accessibility, research ops, and multi-phase programs that support product strategy and digital transformation. Answer Lab has an established presence in San Francisco and New York and secured a strategic growth investment from Shamrock Capital in 2022.

As a Research Manager, you will lead a globally distributed community of UX researchers based across countries such as India, Switzerland, and Korea, partnering with a variety of stakeholder teams within a major tech client. Topics may include emerging technologies, broad usage trends among segments, data security/privacy, new product development, and much more. The ideal candidate will be a UX Research Leader with experience and enthusiasm for both qualitative and quantitative research, who has a keen eye for the nuances required from each client team, and will work flexibly to make them a reality.

You will partner closely with researchers to ensure they have the resources and capacity to both deliver exceptional insights to our clients and foster their career and professional development. You will ensure high-caliber client engagements through exceptional partnerships, research methods, insights, and deliverables.

To ensure success in this role, you must be able to:

• Leverage existing knowledge, context, and all relationships (internal and external) to navigate challenges by developing creative and effective solutions
• Identify efficiencies and opportunities to scale research delivery for maximum profitability
• Provide in-the-moment feedback to researchers to support continuous professional development and to ensure consistent performance at all client touchpoints

You will lead a team of researchers to provide premier service by:

• Ensuring a high standard of program caliber and consistency in all client touch points (e.g., kickoffs, moderation, reporting) via onboarding, maintaining knowledge bases/documentation, and facilitating knowledge shares to new-to-program UXRs
• Adhering to Answer Lab’s Core Values and Framework of Empathetic Leadership, which includes: creating capacity for our teams to navigate new challenges, creating and bolstering our own leadership capacity, and being active, empathetic listeners.
• Providing consistent, individualized support to direct reports via regular 1:1s and performance reviews
• Enabling ongoing career development for UXRs through guidance and mentorship
• Developing and maintaining cross-functional relationships, both inside Answer Lab and with our clients
• Participating in key client and project team meetings (such as project kickoffs and/or report presentations)
• Taking an active role in the hiring and onboarding of new research members

You will impact our clients’ business by:

• Cultivates strong client partnerships to align on evolving needs and identify opportunities to enhance experiences for both researchers and clients.
• Drives thought leadership on emerging UX topics, including AI-enabled research, automation and synthesis tools, novel qualitative and mixed-method approaches, scalable insight frameworks, and evolving industry trends, to help the internal research team and client stay ahead of the market.
• Developing and applying strategic knowledge of the account team/client industry by leveraging learnings across research projects
• Building open, collaborative relationships and communicating comfortably and confidently with stakeholders at all levels, from product owners to designers to C-suite leaders.
• Demonstrates foundational business acumen in support of overall business health and performance, and proactively identifies opportunities to improve outcomes

As a member of the Research Management team, you will contribute to Answer Lab by:

• Collaborating with other Research Managers to develop innovative and impactful research solutions that align with our clients’ business needs and are current…