Director, Design Research, Card

Capital One’s Experience Design organization is focused on co‑creating memorable, meaningful customer and associate experiences that build our brand with humanity and drive business advantage. The goal of Experience Design Research is to accelerate teams’ learning velocity. We do this by conducting primary research studies, assessments, and testing, and by overseeing democratized research/test conducted by others. A key aspect of our role is to find and synthesize existing research and data to help teams acquire the knowledge they need to make informed decisions.

As the Design Research leader across Capital One’s Card organization, you are responsible for leading a research practice that influences our end‑to‑end product ecosystem. You think about the entirety of a customer’s experience and how each component fits into the journey. You partner with product and design stakeholders, create and execute learning agendas, and provide actionable recommendations to inform product experience decisions.

You are a master of research strategy and execution, driving the highest standards of analytical rigor, actionable insights, and scaled impact across multiple product areas. Your goal is to help product teams design and deliver useful and usable experiences to our customers.

• Learning Objective Clarity:
  Consult with multi-disciplinary product teams (design, product management, engineering) to develop and maintain clear learning agendas and research roadmaps. Define and refine primary research questions and objectives to align with business strategy and eliminate knowledge gaps within your domain.
• Research Execution:
  Use expertise and judgment to determine the best research methods and guide the production of research plans within your domain. Oversee the creation of high‑quality research artifacts and establish standards for conducting research sessions and providing effective touchpoints for all partners.
• Expert Analysis:
  Synthesize primary and secondary data across your domain and drive the surfacing of relevant and actionable insights that answer research questions and ensure the timely production of all deliverables.
• Actionable Recommendations:
  Oversee the creation of useful, pragmatic, and concrete recommendations across your product areas. Ensure the tracking of recommendation actioning throughout the product development lifecycle and that product teams can effectively implement recommendations.
• Scaled Impact:
  Opportunistically increase the altitude and aperture of research across your product areas. Ensure research findings create additional leverage and apply research to solve broader, more complex strategic problems across the organization.
• Research Enablement:
  Oversee portfolio‑level consultation and coaching to help non‑researchers conduct certain types of research.

• Results Focus:
  Accountable for the measurable impact of research on key business objectives, ensuring that research investments translate into tangible results, building organizational capability for rigorous measurement, and fostering a culture of results‑orientation and accountability.
• Influence:
  Shape major product portfolios, define research’s contribution to critical business outcomes, build executive partnerships for vision and investment alignment, and elevate research’s reputation and strategic role in the business.
• Collaboration:
  
  Foster an environment where cross‑functional leaders align on strategic objectives, champion shared ownership for outcomes, and effectively mediate complex inter‑team challenges.
• Communication:
  Effectively share research insights and work across multiple levels of altitude, seniority, and job functions, modeling a strategic human‑centered approach that makes the complex accessible, influences senior stakeholders, and achieves impactful results.

• At least 8 years experience conducting qualitative or quantitative user experience research.
• At least 6 years of professional experience conducting user experience research in a corporate environment.
• At least 6 years of experience conducting data analysis (e.g.,…