Director, Design Research, Card

Overview

Director, Design Research, Card

Capital One’s Experience Design organization is focused on co-creating memorable, meaningful customer and associate experiences that build our brand with humanity and drive business advantage. The goal of Experience Design Research is to accelerate teams’ learning velocity. We do this by conducting primary research studies, assessments, and testing. Additionally, we oversee democratized research/testing conducted by others. A key aspect of our role is to find and synthesize existing research and data to help teams acquire the knowledge they seek to make informed decisions. 

As the Design Research leader across Capital One’s Card organization, you are responsible for leading a research practice that influences our end to end product ecosystem. You're able to think about the entirety of a customer's experience and how a given piece fits into the journey. You will partner with product and design stakeholders, create and execute learning agendas, and provide actionable recommendations to inform product experience decisions. You are a master of research strategy and execution, driving the highest standards of analytical rigor, actionable insights, and scaled impact across multiple product areas. Your goal is to help product teams design and deliver useful and usable experiences to our customers.

Role Expectations

This leadership role requires mastery in research strategy, executive influence, and organizational capability building. 

Research Excellence and Delivery

• Learning Objective Clarity: Consult to domain multi-disciplinary product teams (design, product management, engineering) to develop and maintain clear learning agendas and research roadmaps. Define and refine primary research questions and objectives to align with business strategy and ensure the elimination of knowledge gaps within your domain.

• Research Execution: Utilize expertise and judgment to determine the best research methods and guide the production of research plans within your Domain. Oversee the creation of high-quality research artifacts and establish standards for conducting research sessions and providing effective touchpoints for all partners.

• Expert Analysis: Synthesize primary and secondary data across your Domain and drive the surfacing of relevant and actionable insights that answer research questions and ensure the timely production of all deliverables.

• Actionable Recommendations: Oversee the creation of useful, pragmatic, and concrete recommendations across your product areas. Ensure the tracking of recommendation actioning throughout the Product Development Lifecycle and ensure product teams can effectively implement recommendations.

• Scaled Impact: Opportunistically increase the altitude and aperture of research across your product areas. Ensure research findings create additional leverage and apply research to solve broader, more complex strategic problems across the organization.

• Research Enablement: Oversee portfolio-level consultation and coaching to help non-researchers conduct some types of research.

Strategic Influence & Collaboration:

• Results Focus: Accountable for the measurable impact of research on key business objectives, ensuring that research investments translate into tangible results,  building the organizational capability for rigorous measurement and fosters a culture of results-orientation and accountability across levels.

• Influence: Influences major product portfolios, shaping executive strategy and defining research’s contribution to critical business outcomes, building executive partnerships for vision and investment alignment and elevating research’s reputation and strategic role in the business.

• Collaboration: Fosters an environment where cross functional leaders align on strategic objectives, championing shared ownership for outcomes and effectively mediating complex inter-team challenges.

• Communication: Effectively shared research insights and work across multiple levels of altitude, seniority and job functions, modeling a strategic human-centered approach that makes the complex accessible, influences senior stakeholders, and achieves impactful results.

Basic Qualifications

• At least 8 years experience conducting qualitative or quantitative user experience research.

• At least 6 years of professional experience conducting user experience research in a corporate environment.

• At least 6 years of experience conducting data analysis (such as: survey data, behavioral analytics).

• At least 3 years managing user experience research teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• At least 10 years experience conducting qualitative or quantitative user experience research in large, matrixed organizations.  

• At least 8 years managing UX research teams.

• Experience managing managers.

• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills.

• Ability to influence senior executives. 

• Experience with performance management and career coaching.

• Experience attracting and hiring top talent.

• Knowledge with any of the following subjects: Human Factors, User Experience Design, Psychology, Sociology, Communication, Information Architecture, Systems Architecture, Computer Science, Data Science, Economics.

At this time, Capital One will not sponsor a new applicant for employment authorization for this position.

The minimum and maximum full-time annual salaries for this role are listed below, by location. Please note that this salary information is solely for candidates hired to perform work within one of these locations, and refers to the amount Capital One is willing to pay at the time of this posting. Salaries for part-time roles will be prorated based upon the agreed upon number of hours to be regularly worked.

McLean, VA: $226,000 - $257,900 for Director, Design

New York, NY: $246,500 - $281,300 for Director, Design

Richmond, VA: $205,400 - $234,400 for Director, Design

Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location, and the actual annualized salary amount offered to any candidate at the time of hire will be reflected solely in the candidate’s offer letter.

This role is also eligible to earn performance based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonus(es) and/or long term incentives (LTI). Incentives could be discretionary or non discretionary depending on the plan.

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits that support your total well-being. Learn more at theCapital One Careers website. Eligibility varies based on full or part-time status, exempt or non-exempt status, and management level.

This role is expected to accept applications for a minimum of 5 business days.

No agencies please. Capital One is an equal opportunity employer (EOE, including disability/vet) committed to non-discrimination in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Capital One promotes a drug-free workplace. Capital One will consider for employment qualified applicants with a criminal history in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable laws regarding criminal background inquiries, including, to the extent applicable, Article 23-A of the New York Correction Law; San Francisco, California Police Code Article 49, Sections 4901-4920; New York City’s Fair Chance Act; Philadelphia’s Fair Criminal Records Screening Act; and other applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations regarding criminal background inquiries.

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For technical support or questions about Capital One's recruiting process, please send an email to Careers@capitalone.com

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Capital One Financial is made up of several different entities. Please note that any position posted in Canada is for Capital One Canada, any position posted in the United Kingdom is for Capital One Europe and any position posted in the Philippines is for Capital One Philippines Service Corp. (COPSSC).