UX Researcher

Why this job is exciting

As a User Researcher for our Code Graph Org, you will be a crucial member of our exceptional high agency all-remote team to achieve  our company-wide mission of helping Sourcegraph become the standard tool for searching and understanding public code. As a founding member of our User Research group you will also be instrumental in laying the foundations of research best practices. This position is part of the Product team at Sourcegraph, where you will have the opportunity to work closely with designers, product managers, and engineers to better understand our customers, who are also our colleagues: everyone who interacts with tools for data visualization, analysis, and discovery at Sourcegraph.  

Within one month:

• Progress through your onboarding plan, where you will learn Sourcegraph’s story and understand the what, why, and how of the projects that your team is working on, how those projects contribute to our company goals, as well as current status, risks, and mitigations.
• Be transparent in your internal and external communication. Sourcegraph is open source, so most discussions are public or in channels where you communicate directly with our customers.
• Meet and build trusting relationships with your team and key partners in Design, Product Management, and Engineering - they will be key relationships as you collaborate on future research initiatives
• Learn and understand our development process for feature releases, inter-team communication, and agile processes. Offer solutions on continuing to integrate User research into the development process.

Within three months:

• You will build a deep understanding of our users' needs, goals and workflows, turning qualitative user research into insights and artifacts which will shape the future of our products.
• Lead research kickoffs with stakeholders, rapidly understand a new problem space to then identify and scope a fitting research methodology
• Champion customer feedback and translate it into major themes that reflect our customer’s perception of the Sourcegraph brand. Offer recommendations on continuous improvements that win our customers' hearts.
• Have credible conversations with product managers, designers, and engineers about technical design tradeoffs including development frameworks, scalability and performance. 
• Collaborate with product and engineering partners on product development during the discovery phase to assess value, usability and design of features.
• Active involvement in strategic (the “why”), not just tactical (the “how”) realities of the research and recommendations you make.

Within six months: 

• You will have improved planning, communication, and collaboration processes to help the team scale as we grow.
• Champion strategic research from start to finish that helps inform our product roadmap
• Proactively assess current designs and interpret data to generate hypotheses and execute an appropriate research strategy
• Be an ambassador of User Research best practices and be a go-to ally with product, engineering, and other departmental partners.
• Stays on top of industry trends to identify new or enhanced research methodologies that positively impact our ability to uncover deep customer insights.
• You will celebrate the fact that your team has delivered key results in support of their objectives for the year. 

Within one year:

• You will contribute deep product knowledge and insights in collaboration  with product and engineering leadership to develop the next set of ambitious goals that your org should work towards.
• Identify, experiment, and implement process improvements that enhance the impact of the User Research team as the voice of the customer
• Mentor others on best research practices

About you 

You are a top-tier researcher that has the knowledge and technical expertise to help Sourcegraph understand its current and future users. You help teams develop emotional intelligence and see the world through the customer’s eyes. You have a highly developed curiosity to learn about others that makes you an especially good researcher and collaborator. You are strongly aligned with our values, inspired by our mission to make it so that everyone can code, and motivated to do your best work at Sourcegraph.

Qualifications:

• Excellent at communicating insights to leadership and feature teams to help drive strategy to create experiences that technical audiences need and love.
• Ability to thoughtfully and professionally deliver uncomfortable truths about the product or strategy when required.
• Experience defining research problems and building research plans that address the most pressing questions about our customers, products, and business.
• Experience developing a user research agenda for your areas and shape the prioritization of research within those areas.
• Adept at developing and implementing appropriate quantitative and qualitative methods to produce tactical, strategic, actionable, and durable insights that advise design and development.
• Excellent ability to influence decision-making through effective presentation of findings, including the creation of customer-centered narratives to frame problems and highlight the business value of potential solutions.
• Your working hours overlap with 8am-4pm Pacific Time for at least 10 hours per week so we have time to collaborate synchronously when necessary.

Nice to Haves:

• Experience building and shaping the user research team’s tools and practices to scale impact and create insights across the organization
• Previous experience in developer tooling or startups
• You have relevant domain knowledge and experience in one or more of the following areas:  Search, Code Health, Security vulnerabilities, Code reuse

Interview process [~5 hour total interview] 

Click here to read more information in our Handbook about the types of interviews we use at Sourcegraph.

• You apply
• [30 min] Recruiter screen:
• [30 min] Hiring Manager screen
• Async Assignment
  
• In-depth Interview Stage:
  • [1 hr] Assignment review/working session
    • 1 Designer
    • 1 Product Manager
  • [1h] Resume Deep Dive
  • [1 hr] Cross-functional Team collaboration interview
    • 1 Engineering Manager
    • 1 Business Analyst
• [30min] Values interview
• [30m] Leadership Interview
• Any other follow-up interviews if the team has lingering questions
• We make you an offer!

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