Product Research Analyst

Role

The Product Research & Strategy Analyst will work closely with the Product, UX/UI, Technology, Policy, and Research teams to conduct structured research that directly supports the development of SBA products.

The role is responsible for understanding what problem the product needs to solve, who is affected, how the existing process works, what users experience, what existing systems already provide, what gaps remain, and what the product may be missing
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The analyst will convert research findings into actionable inputs for product development, including feature recommendations, user journeys, workflows, UX requirements, KPIs, dependencies, and product improvement recommendations.

• Conduct detailed research to understand user problems, needs, behaviours, and service journeys.
• Map complete user and stakeholder journeys from the initial problem through the final outcome.
• Identify pain points, friction points, unnecessary steps, drop-offs, delays, and failure points within existing processes.
• Research existing government, private-sector, and digital systems relevant to the product.
• Identify features, services, workflows, integrations, or capabilities that may have been missed during product planning.
• Analyse existing products and comparable solutions to identify best practices, limitations, and opportunities for improvement.
• Conduct feature-gap analysis and recommend new, modified, integrated, or removed features based on evidence.
• Research operational workflows to understand how proposed product features will function in real-world environments.
• Translate research findings into clear product and UX requirements for the Product and UX/UI teams.
• Define the required steps, decision points, information requirements, user actions, exceptions, and alternative pathways within a product workflow.
• Research accessibility, multilingual, low-literacy, assisted-access, rural, offline, and other user-specific requirements where applicable.
• Identify data requirements, data sources, existing datasets, APIs, integrations, and system dependencies relevant to product features.
• Research government schemes, policies, guidelines, institutional structures, and existing digital infrastructure that may affect product development.
• Identify potential policy, regulatory, compliance, privacy, or legal dependencies and flag matters requiring formal legal or specialist review.
• Develop evidence-based KPI and success-measurement recommendations for product features and workflows.
• Conduct market, competitor, ecosystem, and benchmarking research where relevant.
• Analyse government reports, official datasets, research papers, audits, evaluations, and other credible sources.
• Validate important facts, statistics, assumptions, and research findings before incorporating them into product recommendations.
• Prepare structured research reports, feature research documents, journey maps, gap analyses, workflow documents, evidence matrices, and recommendation reports.
• Present research findings to Product and UX teams and clearly explain how the findings should influence product decisions.
• Continuously review proposed product features and identify potential gaps, risks, dependencies, and opportunities before development.
• Support the Pilot Learn-Refine-Scale process by analysing pilot results and recommending product improvements based on actual evidence and user behaviour.
  Role & responsibilities