The Principal User Researcher is an integral member of the UX organization. In this role, you’ll be tasked with developing a practice to create understanding and empathy around user needs, stated and unstated, for all product teams including designers, product managers, and engineers. You'll work closely with cross-functional product teams to build high-performing and user-centric products for our customers. You’ll have an opportunity to grow a research practice and lead the user research vision for Paylocity. You will help others in the UX community conduct primary research, explore the behaviors and motivations of our users through methods like field visits, ethnography, surveys, and usability testing. You and your direction of the research practice will help us create useful, usable, and delightful new products and features for people, as well as, continually innovate on our existing products. You'll help inspire change at all stages of product development by delivering compelling, written, in-person and visual presentations on your findings. 

Are you the teammate we are looking for?

Who you are:

• Energized by understanding our user's unmet needs through the proficient application of relevant and appropriate research methods.
• A hands-on contributor with a strategic view of how to shape an in-house research practice at an enterprise SaaS company
• Well versed in the needs for remote vs in person research and choosing tools to get a team set up for success.
• Opportunistic when bringing creativity and fresh thinking to research methods as the practice evolves within the organization
• Passionate about training designers, product managers, and other stakeholders on how to conduct and apply user research.
• An independent thinker and self-starter who proactively seeks out new opportunities with a commitment to the highest quality.
• Passionate, strategic, flexible, and collaborative about advocating for user needs
• A humble facilitator who collaborates and seeks feedback from a diverse, cross-functional team of designers, developers, product owners, business analysts, and product team leaders.
• A communicator who shares user stories and findings across the organization to inform product roadmaps and design decisions.

How we work:

• Curiosity and candor; the quality of the idea wins the day
• Casual, focused, and agile environment operating under our shared principles
• Customers at the center of everything we do
• Small, mission-focused squads with an entrepreneurial spirit backed by enterprise investments
• Consistent routines across stakeholders to ensure complete transparency
• Close working relationship between executive stakeholders and customers

What we offer:

• A compelling mission to elevate payroll and human resources across the backroom and into the boardroom
• Focus on helping our customers automate manual processes, appeal to the modern workforce, and glean insights from analytics
• Lean enabling process that focuses on putting our customers at the center of everything we do
• A commitment to investing in our products, hiring the best talent, and giving them the chance to meaningfully contribute to a vast market opportunity
• Ample opportunity and encouragement to stay current with external training
• A phenomenal talent anywhere culture, where employees can work remotely anywhere in the US and/or work from one of three U.S. offices located in Illinois, Florida and Idaho

What you bring:

• Must have at least 5 years practicing user research and mentoring other to do better research on a product development team.
• Proven success in supporting the full product lifecycle using both exploratory and evaluative research practices for mobile, desktop and other platforms.
• Previous experience shaping a user research practice in an organization, including creating processes across our product and customer success groups.
• Strong background in utilizing qualitative research methods to uncover customer needs such as: persona development, heuristic evaluation, and contextual inquiries
• Experience uncovering customer insights using quantitative research methods such as surveys, benchmarking, and statistics.
• Participating in and collaborating with UX designers and cross-functional teams to develop customer journey maps.
• Outstanding ability to tell impactful stories with research data.
• Proven record of generating actionable insights that have influenced product decisions.
• Proficient at identifying and applying the best research methodology for the learning goals at hand.
• Advocates with confidence as a skilled communicator, influencer, and negotiator.
• Previous research experience at a SaaS company, enterprise SaaS experience is a plus.
• Experienced developing process around recruiting and managing participants 

During the last three months, you would have:

• Lead the UX research strategy by driving, conducting, and coaching others through a range of research studies aiming to inform design and development efforts across the portfolio of the Paylocity suite.
• Defined a research roadmap and priorities in close partnership with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders.
• Generated and communicated actionable insights that will help the business find and solve unaddressed customer pain points.
• Shared and evangelized research insights across the organization.
• Developed ways of assessing user research quality and its impact to the user experience of the Paylocity suite.