Senior Director, Research & User Intelligence, Customer and Developer Experiences

Capital One; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Capital One’s Experience Design (XD) organization seeks a seasoned Head of XD Research & User Intelligence for the CDX group, to elevate user insights, guide discovery, and align research with business goals.

You will lead a 10-person team across Experience Platform, Marketing & Messaging, and Developer Experience, partnering with senior leaders to drive measurable impact and talent development.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Research Focus: Drive strategic research initiatives to tackle critical challenges. Ensure research efforts align with solving key problems and deliver value to both our customers and the company. Your insights will guide impactful decision-making.
• Proactive Research Alignment: Identify areas where research can have the most significant impact. Move beyond reactive projects to building intelligence programs
• Scalable User Experience Research: Define an approach to user experience research that prioritizes insights-driven decisions and impactful outcomes. Establish best practices, develop a research prioritization model
• Research Team Management: Lead and manage a team of user intelligence analysts/researchers
• XDR Leadership Team: Participate as a member of the XD Research & Human Intelligence leadership team
• People and Talent Management: Lead and motivate a high performing team of professionals; provide people management leadership by hiring the best talent, setting goals, developing associates, managing employee performance and compensation decisions, promoting teamwork and handling performance management of the team. Advance Capital One’s people strategies to attract, retain, develop and engage a highly qualified and diverse workforce to achieve business objectives, create an inclusive employee experience and establish leadership development and succession plans to ensure leadership continuity
• Collaboration: Build and maintain close working relationships with key internal and external partners to understand and influence business strategies, priorities and direction. Work closely with senior business and functional leaders to ensure that development plans, resources and strategies are coordinated across all functions in a cohesive fashion

Job description

Capital One’s Experience Design (XD) 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 our XD Research & Human Intelligence team is to accelerate learning velocity – providing product teams with the user knowledge they need to create useful and usable experiences.
We are looking for a seasoned Head of XD Research & User Intelligence for our Customer and Developer Experiences organization (CDX). The CDX organization owns the platforms used by Capital One developers to deliver web and mobile experiences to millions of customers. The 10-person research team spans 3 specific product areas: Experience Platform, Marketing & Messaging, and Developer Experience.
This leader will excel at evaluating complex problems and utilizing systems thinking to develop connected and cumulative user intelligence solutions. You will collaborate closely with senior CDX leaders across business, design, product, and engineering. One of the most important aspects of this role is the focus on elevating our user research practice along with talent, recruiting, and building a world-class team.
Key Responsibilities
The head of XD Research & User Intelligence for CDX is responsible for accelerating learning velocity and ensuring partner/stakeholder learning needs are met and high-quality decisions are being made that benefit both the customer and the business.
You will guide your team to build cumulative user intelligence, create and maintain research programs, support continuous discovery and rapid testing, and drive experience measurement. Your team will make use of both human-centered research methods and AI skills to conduct discovery, testing, and assessments.
This role requires mastery in executive leadership, human factors, digital product design, experience measurement, and analytical thinking and proficiency with product management principles, behavioral analytics, and quantitative analysis.

• Strategic Research Focus: Drive strategic research initiatives to tackle critical challenges. Ensure research efforts align with solving key problems and deliver value to both our customers and the company. Your insights will guide impactful decision-making.
• Proactive Research Alignment: Identify areas where research can have the most significant impact. Move beyond reactive projects to building intelligence programs
• Scalable User Experience Research: Define an approach to user experience research that prioritizes insights-driven decisions and impactful outcomes. Establish best practices, develop a research prioritization model
• Research Team Management: Lead and manage a team of user intelligence analysts/researchers
• XDR Leadership Team: Participate as a member of the XD Research & Human Intelligence leadership team
• People and Talent Management: Lead and motivate a high performing team of professionals; provide people management leadership by hiring the best talent, setting goals, developing associates, managing employee performance and compensation decisions, promoting teamwork and handling performance management of the team. Advance Capital One’s people strategies to attract, retain, develop and engage a highly qualified and diverse workforce to achieve business objectives, create an inclusive employee experience and establish leadership development and succession plans to ensure leadership continuity
• Collaboration: Build and maintain close working relationships with key internal and external partners to understand and influence business strategies, priorities and direction. Work closely with senior business and functional leaders to ensure that development plans, resources and strategies are coordinated across all functions in a cohesive fashion

You are a deeply technical research executive who is comfortable and effective at all levels of the organization. You are a strategic thought partner, capable of communicating and influencing senior leadership. You have the ability to collaborate across the enterprise, building relationships with key stakeholders. You have extensive experience building and leading world class teams with a balance of customer experience insights and business acumen. You are an inspiring leader with well-honed recruiting and coaching skills with the ability and passion for developing your direct reports.