User Researcher Lead

We’re Koru.

Koru is a venture foundry aiming to build a portfolio of new startups that drive breakout growth. We build from 0-1, generating, validating, and scaling ventures that address customer frictions head-on — and leverage our corporate partnerships to gain an unfair advantage in the market.

Join us if you:

• Are keen on learning and fast-tracking your career progression with proven performance.
• Love autonomy and want to make key decisions in the early days of new ventures.
• Want to diversify your experience and knowledge across industries and geographies.
• Are looking to make an impact and create the culture in our small but growing Koru team.

We’re a first-of-its-kind innovation platform with a well-funded runway from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, a $200B+ Canadian investor with over 90 portfolio companies around the world — giving us access to innovate across dozens of different industries on a global scale.

We expect to create game-changing ventures while promoting a truly entrepreneurial mindset and creating a culture of fearless reinvention.

Introducing our Venture Teams.

Our venture teams consist of world-class entrepreneurs & experts from disciplines spanning business, design, engineering, product, and growth. Joining our remarkable multidisciplinary team will challenge you to push the boundaries of the industry, without the distractions of raising capital. If you have the passion, tenacity, and curiosity to build innovative ventures from the ground up, we invite you to join our mission.

At Koru, you can unleash your research superpowers working side by side with a carefully selected group of startup veterans who recognize how vital research is in ensuring we are building the “right” product. Being based on an intimate understanding of consumers and customers is not a nice to have for Koru, but an essential part of how we approach disruptive innovation. As we continue to build new ventures, you will have an opportunity to be exposed to a wide array of industries, be a vital voice around the decision-making table, go deep within one venture and help shape the Research function at Koru for years to come.

If you have an inquisitive mindset that fuels your desire to constantly learn, improve and iterate, an ability to turn business issues into the right research questions, and connect those questions to the most suitable data collection methods balancing between fast turnaround and enough depth, then your place is with us!

Responsibilities

• Own the research component of a venture - this means you will work with a General Manager on the overall venture research strategy, its design, and then drive its execution with other team members.
• Leverage unique resources available at your fingertips to spend less time on logistics and more time doing actual research
• Run research studies with a rapid turnaround – market sensing, usability testing, motivations and customer needs studies
• Gather and analyze data from different qualitative and quantitative research methods
• Communicate research results to venture boards, and also to other Koru team members
• Document the core methodologies or collaboration frameworks that you designed to raise the overall Koru research standards

Qualifications & Skills

• Advanced research-focused degree in human-computer interaction, human factors, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience
• 5+ years of industry experience in user research design and execution as part of a product-focused startup company
• Expertise in various qualitative and quantitative methodologies (field studies, ethnography, interviewing, contextual inquiry, questionnaire development & survey research, usability studies, market sensing, etc.)
• Strong storytelling capabilities, bringing research findings to life in creative ways, utilizing excellent data visualization artifacts (storyboards, user flows, low fidelity wireframes, journey maps, videos)
• Proven track record in building strong partnerships with product, engineering, design and with leadership, and a demonstrated ability to influence decisions with insights and an informed point of view
• Willingness to travel

Great to have

• Experience in building completely new products, and bringing them to the market
• Experience with research in Agile development environments/design sprints
• Experience in data science, analytics and advanced statistics

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