Lead Researcher

2 weeks ago

Toronto, Ontario, Canada Koru Full time
We are Koru.
Koru is a first of its kind venture studio funded by Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. We partner with OTPP portfolio companies to build and invest in businesses with a clear right to win.

Founded in 2019, our mission is to drive value creation aimed at growing the overall value of OTPP's portfolio companies by partnering with them to identify, validate, build and oversee new disruptive businesses.

We go from 0-1, building ventures that address customer frictions head-on — and we leverage our corporate partnerships to gain unfair advantages in the market.

We offer a unique balance of risk and reward where startup talent can build with the backing of a $250B pension plan and the ability to impact portfolio companies all around the world, explore disruptive new opportunities and share in the upside of every business we put into the market.

We promote a truly entrepreneurial mindset and a culture of fearless reinvention.
If you get excited by building innovative products that allow new entrants to disrupt existing industries, enjoy working in a collaborative and dynamic startup environment, have an entrepreneurial spirit, and have developed strong product leadership chops, then your place may be with us

As Lead Researcher you will:

Shape Research Goals & Objectives

  • Work with Venture GMs, Product, Growth, Business Operations, and other members of the Koru team to define research needs, goals, objectives and methods
  • Identify/prioritize critical research hypotheses & assumptions relative to venture goals
Plan & Design Research

  • Design the appropriate qualitative and quantitative research experiments, including but not limited to: defining the characteristics & quantity of research participants; developing research screening questions & interview guides; establishing content/channels for participant engagement; and environments for data collection
Execute Research

  • Conduct relevant primary and secondary research to gather evidence needed to validate / invalidate key venture (user & market) hypotheses
  • Collect and analyze user behavior through field visits, ethnography (observation/interviews), surveys, benchmark studies, usergenerated data and other relevant experiments
  • Iteratively design, test and iterate on product & service concepts/features to validate problemsolution fit
Document & Communicate Research Results

  • Design and facilitate immersion sessions with multidisciplinary portfolio company teams
  • Advocate research findings to diverse audiences through written & visual assets
  • Bring your research to life through personas, customer journeys, insightopportunity frameworks, system maps, stories and scenarios that have a tangible impact on ventures
  • Work with the design team to communicate opportunities and ideas that are grounded by research findings (i.e. product concepts/features, service models, tobe customer journeys & systems)
  • Demonstrate significance & prevalence of research findings to derisk venture decisions
As a Lead Researcher, you'll also play a key role in shaping the research and strategic design practice at Koru

which entails:

  • Evolving the research and humancentered design toolkit across Koru to improve quality and confidence in research outcomes
  • Representing Koru, and connecting Koru into the broader research, design and startup ecosystem to support the evolution and growth of our practice
  • Contributing to thought leadership across the organization

You should have:

  • A Masters degree (or a related field or equivalent practical experience) in Design, Strategy, Anthropology, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Human Factors, Psychology, Sociology.
  • Experience planning, leading, executing and synthesizing research utilizing mixed methods including but not limited to contextual inquiry, usability studies, and surveys.
  • A significant track record shaping real world user experiences and delivering tangible products to market, with a min. of 5+ years experience leading projects to completion.
  • An outstanding portfolio of work demonstrating strong humancentered design capabilities across a diverse range of projects.

Highly Desirable Skills:

  • Autonomy: comfortable defining scope and priorities independently and proactively, while also being able to manage shifting circumstances and ambiguity.
  • ZerotoOne: Experience planning and executing earlystage research that has lead to changes to existing products, or new product development.
  • Creative User Engagement: Experience using UXR recruitment, testing & synthesis tools such as UserInterviews, Userbrain, UserTesting, PollFish, Typeform, Dovetail, etc.
  • Quant Skills: Experience in executing quantitative user research to validate desirability; statistical analysis; and measuring statistical significance of research results.
  • Persuasive communication: Engaging storytelling skills that capture and distill complex insights in a meaningful way for diverse audiences.
  • Facilitation ski

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