Design Researcher (Microsoft)

Are you passionate about understanding and empathizing with people? Do you have experience moving teams to deliver human-centered design through deep customer insights? Are you the type of person who loves to learn, and apply innovation to what you do? Does the idea of delivering AI powered experiences into Office in a deeply human centric way excite you?

If yes, we may just be the team for you! The Office Planning and Research team is seeking a strong User Researcher II to join our growing team of over 25 researchers. Our team’s mission is to impact the value people find in Office, and how they feel using it, by driving customer-informed decisions. We work in partnership with product and program managers, designers, engineers, and developers - transforming the experience for our users while being careful stewards of a successful business. We are looking for an experienced user research to join our team, focused on creating AI powered experiences in a human centered and ethical way.

Our team is dedicated to creating an inclusive culture for the most diverse and talented group of employees. We’re looking for someone who wants to learn, grown, and embody new ways of working. If you embrace growth mindset, have a track record of delivering results, and you light up collaborating with other researchers, designers, product managers and engineers this is an awesome team to join.

Responsibilities

• Build and execute impactful research plan(s) that provide the broad market views and deep customer insights needed to impact Office AI strategy and UX
• Collaborate with data scientists to derive insights from quantitative data, complementing other research that you will conduct on your own or in partnership with other researchers. 
• Continuously inform an engineering roadmap using customer data (qualitative and quantitative). Key to this accountability will be identifying gaps and customer pain points, as well as potential customer delighters. 
• Land impact broadly from your customer-focused knowledge by working across multiple organizations and their respective engineering, design and marketing teams.

Qualifications

What does it take? 

Balance business motivations and end-user value 

• You are eager to learn and understand our customer audiences, their behaviors, context(s) and motivations – across all phases of the customer lifecycle and user journey 
• Can demonstrate strong empathy for the users while balancing the vision and constraints of stakeholders 

Desire to work in-stride with other people:  PMs, developers, designers, other researchers, marketers   

• Really, you must love this part of the job.  The lines between this role and others are often unclear and you must be comfortable with contributing, engaging others despite the ambiguity  
• Be ready to win together. This team has intentionally designed a structure where we work together.

Entrepreneurial spirit with dirty hands 

• You will need practical and real-world problem-solving skills, as this team moves fast, and your role will be to help unblock barriers in design, build and go-to-market 
• 3+ years of hands-on research and/or product planning experience, with demonstrated skill in collecting and analyzing human behavioral data to improve plans and UX in a technology industry setting 
• Either an MA/MS in human factors, psychology, market research or related field, or a BA/BS in one of these fields with significant industry experience 

Note: Your experiences and your demonstrated skill-sets are far more important than your level. If you are interested, feel free to apply regardless of your level.

If the above sounds like you, we can’t wait to talk to you!