Associate Director, Design Research

At WHOOP, we’re on a mission to unlock human performance and healthspan. WHOOP empowers members to perform at a higher level through a deeper understanding of their bodies, behaviors, and daily lives.

WHOOP is hiring an Associate Director of Design Research to lead and scale the Design Research practice s role will oversee Design Research, shaping how user feedback and experiences inform product innovation from early-stage insights to pre-launch validation studies to post-launch feedback. As a people-first leader, you will balance strategic direction, team development, and leadership evangalism—ensuring research rigor, creativity, and impact across the product lifecycle.

• Provide strategic leadership for the design research team, ensuring alignment with key stakeholders and organizational priorities.
• Evangelize the importance of user insights and the role of design research in the product and hardware development lifecycle to WHOOP senior leadership.
• Scale research impact, working closely with cross-functional leaders to identify opportunities for research and set expectations for mixed-methods research, ensuring research is positioned as a critical input to decision-making.
• Partner closely with senior team members to review research needs, assess tradeoffs, and guide prioritization and research direction.
• Manage, coach, and develop a team of design researchers, fostering strong research craft, clear communication, and professional growth.
• Own relationships with external research vendors, including scoping projects, defining success criteria, and ensuring high-quality execution.
• Build a strong, cross-functional "voice of the member" for product decision-making in partnership with Consumer Insights, Analytics, and Membership Services.

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field such as human factors, design research, user experience research, design anthropology, psychology, or a related discipline.
• 5+ years of experience conducting user research for physical products, ideally within hardware, health, or consumer product environments.
• 5+ years of people management experience, including coaching, feedback, and performance development.
• Strong mixed-methods research background, with demonstrated application of qualitative and quantitative approaches to real-world products.
• Experience working within or alongside hardware development life cycles (not software-only).
• Experience managing or partnering with external research vendors, including project scoping and execution.
• Ability to manage multiple work streams, navigate ambiguity, and influence without direct authority across cross-functional teams.
• Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills, with the ability to communicate complex insights to executive audiences.
• Strong commitment to embracing and leveraging AI tools in day-to-day tasks, ensuring AI-assisted work aligns with the same high-quality standards as personal contributions.

* This role is based out of our Boston, MA headquarters and requires work onsite Monday-Friday.

Interested in the role, but don’t meet every qualification? We encourage you to still apply! At WHOOP, we believe there is much more to a candidate than what is written on paper, and we value character as much as experience. As we continue to build a diverse and inclusive environment, we encourage anyone who is interested in this role to apply.

WHOOP is an Equal Opportunity Employer and participates in E-verify to determine employment eligibility. It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

The WHOOP compensation philosophy…