Senior Manager, UX Research - Stores

About the role:

Stores UX Research focuses on understanding how store team members and leaders work across complex operational, service, and digital experiences. The team partners closely with Product, Design, Technology, and Store Operations to simplify work, improve decision-making, and shape experiences that lead to better team member and guest outcomes.  

As Senior Manager of UX Research for Stores, you will lead the research strategy and team supporting these experiences and help focus UX Research on the problems and decisions where it can have the greatest impact. You will help ensure UX Research focused on the problems and decisions where it can have the greatest impact. Success in this role is measured by the impact research has on decisions, experiences, and outcomes, not by the volume of research delivered. Your team will help partners identify the right problems, make better decisions, improve experiences, reduce risk, and influence meaningful outcomes.

This role requires a leader who operates as a strategic partner to Product, Design, Technology, Store Operations, Data Science, and business teams. You will help shape priorities, make sure research is present at the right planning moments, and make sure user understanding is reflected in product strategy and decision-making.

You will set a high bar for the team while creating the conditions for researchers to operate with real ownership. You will coach researchers to build strong partnerships, bring a point of view, identify where research can add the most value, and feel empowered to redirect or say no to work that does not meet that bar.

You will also help evolve how Stores UXR works as AI changes research practice, identifying responsible ways to improve research speed, quality, synthesis, reuse, and insight activation while keeping human judgment, research ethics, and rigor central to the work. 

Responsibilities:

• Lead the Stores UX Research strategy, making certain research is focused on the highest-impact user problems, product decisions, and business priorities. 

• Set research priorities with senior cross-functional partners and ensure the team is involved in planning, roadmap development, prioritization, and discovery at the moments where research can shape direction. 

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of 3 researchers, setting clear expectations for craft, partnership, ownership, and impact and providing direct, actionable feedback that helps them grow. 

• Build trusted relationships with senior partners across Product, Design, Technology, Store Operations, Data Science, and the broader business. 

• Define and evolve research priorities and roadmaps across Stores, balancing foundational understanding, discovery, evaluative research, and longer-term strategic learning. 

• Coach researchers to operate as strategic partners, bringing a strong research point of view rather than waiting for requests and prioritizing where research can materially change an outcome. 

• Empower the team to defer, redirect, or decline lower-impact work when appropriate so capacity stays focused on the most important questions and decisions. 

• Champion durable understanding of store team members, leaders, workflows, and experiences through personas, journeys, service design, foundational research, experience measurement, and other reusable research assets. 

• Help teams move from insight to action, ensuring research translates into clear implications, decisions, priorities, and measurable experience improvements. 

• Create visibility into research priorities, progress, learning, and impact, and connect insights across product areas so learning can be reused instead of recreated. 

• Explore and scale responsible uses of AI and automation that improve research planning, analysis, synthesis, reporting, and insight activation while maintaining quality, ethics, privacy, and rigor. 

• Contribute to broader Enterprise UX Research standards, talent development, ways of working, and adoption of emerging research capabilities. 

Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs. 

About you:

• 7+ years of experience in UX research, product research, applied research, human-centered design, behavioral science, or a related field. 

• Proven experience in a people management role including hiring, leading, and coaching high performing, cross-geography or remote teams 

• Strong understanding of qualitative, quantitative, evaluative, foundational, and strategic UX research methods and the judgment to apply them appropriately. 

• Demonstrated ability to set a high bar, provide clear and direct feedback, and grow researcher ownership, judgment, and influence. 

• Ability to connect research to product strategy, business outcomes, roadmaps, and measurable impact. 

• Strong cross-functional influence and experience partnering with Product, Design, Technology, Operations, Analytics, Data Science, and business teams. 

• Ability to create clarity from ambiguity, make prioritization tradeoffs, and balance near-term product needs with longer-term learning. 

• Strong written, verbal, and visual storytelling skills, with the ability to turn complex insights into clear direction for partners and leaders. 

• Interest in responsibly applying AI-enabled tools and emerging capabilities to improve UXR quality, speed, scale, and reuse. 

• Experience with retail, frontline employee experiences, enterprise tools, operational workflows, or similarly complex ecosystems is a plus.