UX Research Manager, Payments

About Stripe

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies - from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups - use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and we have a staggering amount of work ahead. That means you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone's reach while doing the most important work of your career.

Research at Stripe

Stripe’s mission is to increase the GDP of the internet and expand economic access globally. We design tools and infrastructure to help our users start, run, and scale an online business from anywhere in the world. We believe there are too many barriers to doing business on the internet and that opportunities are not equally distributed around the world. We also believe that building and growing a business online is a problem rooted in code, language, and design, not finance.

That’s where you come in. We’re looking for an experienced UX Research Manager to join our growing UX Research team and help build, coach, and mentor a growing and highly skilled group of researchers.

About UX research and the role

The UX Research team is part of Stripe’s Design team. It works across brand and product initiatives to deliver products and experiences that meet user needs. Since Stripe’s main audience is people who build products, we take pride in creating user-friendly, user-focused experiences.

In addition to conducting primary research, we enable other Stripes, including engineers, product managers, designers, and operations teams, to learn and apply research skills to global problems. You will help shape research as a core competency across Stripe and define how we put users first in our research.

As a UX Research Manager, you will use your people-management and research expertise to lead a team of researchers that collaborates with product teams on core Payments and Risk products to build insight-driven product experiences. Core Payments includes Stripe’s in-person and online payment capabilities, checkout suite, Radar, and smart solutions that help businesses achieve optimal payment performance while balancing regulatory requirements, conversion, costs, and fraud considerations.

You will report to the Head of Research.

Responsibilities

• Lead, manage, coach, and mentor a team of researchers conducting mixed-methods research throughout the product-development process for Stripe’s Payments and Risk product pillar.
• Lead initiatives and guide the research team through artificial intelligence (AI) transformation in its internal processes, how it conducts research for Stripe users, and how it supports the changing needs of product partners.
• Share research insights that deepen Stripe’s understanding of user needs and identify opportunities to meet those needs.
• Grow the team to meet Stripe’s needs while developing individual contributors to deliver impactful, actionable research studies.
• Partner with Design and Stripe leadership to determine how to best use user research at Stripe and deepen our understanding of users.
• Work as a strategic partner to business leads, product managers, design leaders, and Stripe leadership. Define long-term strategy and short-term tactics for products by grounding decisions in user needs and insights.
• Prioritize research needs and approaches across multiple workstreams. Select the right project, scale, and scope at the right time, and deliver actionable insights.
• Enable other Stripes to learn and apply research skills by building research programs, platforms, and toolkits that support tactical research.
• Partner closely with other researchers to build Stripe’s research practice and infrastructure, including sourcing research vendors to support your team’s work.

We're looking for someone who meets the minimum requirements to be considered for the role. If you meet these requirements, you are encouraged to apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a requirement.

Minimum requirements

• 7+ years of relevant user research experience working on digital experiences and generating actionable insights that drive impact.
• 3+ years of people-management and leadership experience.
• Experience directly managing, coaching, and developing a team of user researchers, as well as recruiting and building research teams.
• Ability to set and achieve priorities that balance the needs of users, projects, the Research team, and Stripe.
• Experience conducting project work while mentoring and supporting a team of user researchers as they develop their craft and conduct research.

Preferred qualifications

• Relevant experience in financial technology, particularly payment processing.
• Ability to motivate and inspire people to do their best work.
• Experience conducting complex research at scale using a range of methods, including qualitative interviews, surveys, ideation sessions, ethnographic field research, usability evaluations, and diary studies.
• Experience conducting primary research while mentoring and supporting a team of user researchers as they develop their craft and conduct research.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience rolling out large-scale research programs.
• A consistent focus on users and their needs, with experience driving impact from insights.
• Understanding of the balance between speed and rigor, and how research translates into design, product, and business decisions. Ability to work with urgency and focus while adapting methodological rigor to the situation.
• Experience building or scaling research platforms, systems, or programs.