Senior Design Research Operations Specialist – Project Manager/ Vendor Manager

Truist is on the verge of a big move—a move that aims to alter the course of banking as we know it. And to do that we are looking for some unique talent. Our rapidly growing team is looking for the best people to join our cause and drive transformation. If you’re passionate, driven to create change, and interested in joining a team doing transformative work, let’s talk.

We need you to help us build our newly established Research Operations function. Your purpose– to ensure the UX Research team delivers on the value that it promises: excellent, insightful, and timely user research. The Research Ops specialist will manage many responsibilities that support our researchers including managing our team’s systems and tools, impact tracking, outreach and recruiting, and establishing unified processes that will help our team become more effective and efficient. The process and work you do will have direct and visible impacts to our research team.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Following is a summary of the essential functions for this job. Other duties may be performed, both major and minor, which are not mentioned below. Specific activities may change from time to time.

Establish and manage research panels

• Build and manage a research panel for our niche user groups
• Establish a pipeline for connecting UX Researchers to our clients that are a part of those panels
• Maintain good panel practices – prevent attrition, re-recruit when necessary, and sunset individuals to maintain good panel health

Manage relationships with recruitment and research vendors.

• Refine practices for communicating with our vendors regarding new research and recruitment requests
• Find and lead evaluations of new vendors and tools that support the research team
• Work with our design operations team to onboard, renew, and manage research vendors
• Collaborate with other research teammates to keep track of and manage our vendor budget, forecast, and expenditure

Define and manage our outreach programs

• Help us attract and hire key talent by building recruitment strategies, documentation, and managing our hiring process across all open roles
• Establish a pipeline for researchers to share research practices and knowledge at industry events, community sites, or periodicals

Manage other aspects that enable us to be an efficient and world class research team

• Assist the team in identifying and participating in conferences, training, and growth opportunities
• Help to discover, define, share, and automate research processes
• Develop, maintain, and share team resources
• Lead team workshops, and co-create cultural events with other researchers

Required Qualifications:
The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

• BS with 6 years or MS degree with 3 years’ experience in User Experience, Interaction Design, Communication Design, Information Architecture, Psychology, HCI, Human Factors, other related field or equivalent work experience.
• Minimum of 2-3 years of experience in the role of an experience design researcher
• Strong knowledge of research techniques and the understanding of when to use what technique to ensure validity of data collected when conducting research with human participants. Extensive knowledge of experimental design to ensure bias is not introduced in the conducting of user research.
• Track record of conducting research complex projects and delivering transformative insights. Experience representing and evangelizing user research to business partners.
• Excellent leadership, communication, collaboration, and presentation skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience managing research team processes, such as orchestrating a recurring testing program, supervising a participant panel, overseeing vendor relationships, maintaining team documentation, or others.
• Experience coordinating multiple fast-moving projects of varying complexity levels concurrently,
• Experience with usability testing and survey platforms, such as UserZoom, UserTesting.com, Optimal Workshop, Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, or others.
• Experience working in agile design environments.
• Experience working in banking or financial services industries.