Senior Manager, UX Research

An overview of this role

As the Senior Manager, UXR, you will lead the UX Research strategy for GitLab. Reporting directly into the VP, UX, you will lead a team with of 4 direct reports, including a Manager and 3 Staff Researchers. Research is highly valued at GitLab, we're extremely data driven and the UXR team is key to that. You'll be responsible for business critical performance indicators like SUS and CSAT. You'll lead efforts to evolve research methodologies and practices as we continue to scale, and ensure research is well-integrated into our product development workflow and decision-making. 

We are currently devising a new UX research vision and strategy, and you will be critical in establishing and driving this with the UXR team and broader business.

Here are some links to more info:

• UX Research department page
• UX Department page

What you'll do

• Deliver impactful user research insights to support and enable the GitLab product vision and strategy.
• Work collaboratively with Product Designers and Product Managers to understand user behaviours, motivations, attitudes and needs.
• Evolve the UX Research team vision and strategy; energise and empower the team to action it.

What you'll bring

• Demonstrated UX Research leadership experience at the executive level.
• Must have experience leading UXR Mangers and very senior IC's (Staff+ level).
• While you won't be hands on in this role, you must have previous hands on experience and a current, deep understanding of:
  • Qualitative and quantitative research.
  • Service design, including JTBD and journey mapping.
  • User metrics (NPS, CSAT, SUS, etc).
  • Research operations.
• Strong experience influencing stakeholders, advocating for critical research/insights to be adopted.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, confident in presenting to C-level executives.
• Strategic business acumen - align the company mission with strategic team objectives.
• Ideally have experience working at an enterprise-focused SaaS company.

About the team

We have invested significantly in UX, with a large 90+ person team and a new VP of UX who reports directly to our Chief Product Officer. The UX org consists of Product Design, Technical Writing and UX Research. The UX team has reached a good level of maturity, and through this have established the importance of understanding our users and acting on that data to drive innovation. There is still work to be done to improve this, but the fundamental understanding of why UX matters is there. The team is globally distributed, with team members based across the US, Canada, Europe, the UK, India, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.