Design Research Lead

The Problems You’ll Solve

Carta is in search of a Design Research Lead who is radically inspired by people, gathers great insights, and can work alongside an exceptional design team creating and shipping innovative digital product experiences across the company. This person is passionate about leading projects, skilled at uncovering human-centered insights, and experienced at translating these insights into opportunities for design and product innovation. Our ideal candidate is savvy, curious, enjoys working cross-functionally, and can effectively communicate and story tell insights to leadership. This person must be a self-starter who can work through ambiguity to lead projects from start to finish. We are looking for someone who can inspire fellow designers and stakeholders, and lead with both user empathy and conviction.

As a Design Research Lead, you will play a crucial role throughout the product lifecycle — using research to inspire our design teams, inform rich prototypes, and champion the needs of our Carta users. You’ll uncover insights across many unique customer and user archetypes including: company founders, employees vesting equity, investors, law firms, tax experts, and our Carta service and delivery colleagues.

Additionally you will:

• Lead and own research for diverse product teams through the entire project journey focusing on, but not limited to, how companies, investors, and employees interact, leverage, and use our platform
• Design, scope, and run user research including research planning, participant recruiting, data analysis, synthesis and storytelling
• Utilize strengths in both qualitative and quantitative research methods including usability testing, prototype testing, field studies, data analysis, and survey design
• Gather rich data, synthesize, and generate insights and opportunities to create more intuitive, useful and usable experiences to generate user advocacy
• Creatively articulate insights and stories with excellent visualization and communication skills to promote empathy and inspiration
• Make research findings relevant and impactful for product and design through crafted insights, decks, stories, videos, and testimonials
• Influence the product strategy and roadmap to ensure we are building with human-centered needs in mind
• Build and implement new or innovative user research processes and methods to meet Carta’s product delivery goals across desktop, mobile, and offline interactions
• Define and influence how research and strategy fits into the Product Development Life Cycle
• Mentor other designers, strategists, and product partners on how to effectively carry out research and gain crucial insights through coaching and technical training.
• Contribute to building a strong human centered design culture

About You

We are looking for a strong Design Researcher and Strategist to influence and evolve our existing Carta products, explore new product opportunities, and advocate what’s best for our users. This person can drive strategy, ideation, prioritization, problem solving, and product delivery. If you are passionate about building intuitive solutions to complex problems that provide direct value to users, we would love to talk with you. In our search, we’re prioritizing: 

• Experience drawing from a variety of research methods — interviews, observations, diary studies, prototyping, surveys, user testing, and experiments — at different stages in the design process to inspire early design work, inform the initial opportunity, collect formative feedback to support iteration, and validate a go-to-market solution.
• Proven ability to use human-centered insight to answer business questions
• Familiarity with quantitative research methods and data analysis
• Exceptional communication and storytelling skills that allow you to turn insights, strategy, and early design solutions into artifacts that collaborators will savor (journey maps, vision pieces, manifestos, concept illustrations, design principles).
• Ability to work flexibly, yet efficiently — exercising a balance between research rigor and design scrappiness.
• High comfort level with ambiguity; openness to critique from other disciplines and curiosity to learn from a spectrum of perspectives.
• A strong portfolio of case studies that demonstrates unfailing advocacy for the user highlighting research plans, reports, and artifacts
• Passion for mentoring teams and teaching others about research
• Nice-to-have: experience with finance, or the venture capital space