UX Principal - Synthetic Research

Position Purpose:

At The Home Depot, we get UX; it is baked into our DNA. Now we are expanding our team to drive new initiatives. As a leader in the UX team, you will work with other strategists, designers, and researchers to help craft end-to-end experiences and drive strategic direction.
This role will be the driving force behind our synthetic research practice, bringing AI expertise to help generate insights at scale for the organization. You will succeed in this role if you have a strong research background and AI knowledge, with an understanding on AI limitations and ethical constraints. You are capable of building and calibrating customer data to produce meaningful AI representations to be used for initial product testing. You have a passion for exploring new methodologies and teaching others, including when not to use synthetic research. You have solid awareness of design best practices and know that research is the foundation towards good design.

You appreciate feedback and support from fellow researchers, designers, engineers, analysts, or product managers in our cross functional environment. You enjoy collaborative effort, taking feedback and input to your activities as a means of improving the end result. You are as comfortable influencing business leadership as you are your product leadership and individual contributors. You are the customer and user advocate. You drive innovation by championing actionable user insights, deeply understanding our customers, enhancing product usability, and providing our team avenues to delight our customers. You communicate effectively and share a point of view that guides quality decisions.
Responsible for strategic UX research, building synthetic panels to compliment traditional research methods
Support scaling our synthetic research practice, setting appropriate guardrails and guidance on appropriate use cases
Can take on various ways of leading as needed (e.g. strategist, researcher, analyst)
Operates autonomously in their role.
Proactively identifies insights and opportunities and drives consistency and standards within the practice.
Work cross-functional with other design operational teams to ensure connected workflows and tooling alignment

Key Responsibilities:

20% - Coaching and Mentoring - Leads interview exercises, determine cultural and team fits of candidates and aligns needs of the organization. Coaches domain resources (junior resources in UX activities and mentors UX resources for career development). Helps UX Leadership align resources to products based on skillset and cultural fit.
40% - Delivery and Execution - Models & ensures consistency of deliverables. Delivers UX strategy artifacts (e.g., experience maps, service blueprints, etc.). Drives delivery in product area. Leads synthesis and facilitation activities.
40% - Leads Planning and Strategy Activities to Align Design Patterns and Testing Methods - Clearly communicates insights and opportunities and drives value of UX across experiences. Displays situational adaptability, is able to step in and drive change in products to better align with user needs or organizational goals. Has courage and organizational savvy to drive this change. Drives UX practice across experience, domain, or group of products. Drives vision and purpose; Combines user research outputs with OGSMs or OKRs of partners to clearly articulate the vision of their experiences and drive alignment with partners in solutions across products and experiences. Partners with Product, Development, other UX resources and business stakeholders across products to align multiple experiences in a domain.

Direct Manager/Direct Reports:

This position typically reports to User Experience Sr. Principal, User Experience Sr. Manager, or User Experience Director.
This role has 0 direct reports.

Travel Requirements:

Typically requires overnight travel less than 10% of the time.

Physical Requirements:

Most of the time is spent sitting in a comfortable position and there is frequent opportunity to move about. On rare occasions, there may be a need to move or lift light articles.

Working Conditions:

Located in a comfortable indoor area. Any unpleasant conditions would be infrequent and not objectionable.

Minimum Qualifications:

Must be 18 years of age or older.
Must be legally permitted to work in the United States.

Preferred Qualifications:

5+ years of experience working with agile software development teams
Strong interpersonal savvy

Minimum Education:

The knowledge, skills and abilities typically acquired through the completion of a bachelor's degree program or equivalent degree in a field of study related to the job.

Preferred Education:

The knowledge, skills and abilities typically acquired through the completion of a bachelor's degree program or equivalent degree in a field of study related to the job.

Minimum Years of Work Experience:

6

Preferred Years of Work Experience:

10

Minimum Leadership Experience:

None

Preferred Leadership Experience:

1

Certifications:

None

Competencies:

Decision Quality
Collaborates
Drives Engagement
Ensures Accountability
Plans and Aligns
Develops Talent
Manages Conflict