Design Researcher

Techtronic Industries - TTI•Anderson, SC

3d•Onsite

About The Position

We are looking for a Design Researcher to join our Advanced Concepts team at TTI within the Consumer Power Tools Group, supporting the RYOBI and RIDGID brands in Anderson, South Carolina. The Design Researcher will join the Advanced Concepts team to explore our users' needs, pain points, and contexts delivering actionable insights to the Product Development team. The primary research methodology of this Design Research role is in-field qualitative research, with supplemental quantitative and online research. This role will be onsite at our Anderson, SC location.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Consumer Insights, Communications, Psychology, Sociology, or a related field. What matters is how you think about people and how you tell their story, not your major.
Qualitative research skills: in-home / in-field ethnography, in-depth interviews (IDIs), contextual inquiry, and prototype evaluation
Analytical: comfort analyzing qualitative and quantitative data and finding the insight that matters
Category thinking: understands consumer behavior and can identify unmet needs, gaps, and opportunity spaces
Synthesis: turns complex, messy findings into clear and actionable direction
Ability to translate consumer needs into language engineers and product teams can act on
Strong work ethic
Ability to work within a multi-disciplinary team effectively
Disposition to thrive in a fast-paced environment with responsibility for multiple projects at once
25-35% overnight domestic travel
Mid-Level: 3-5 years of experience with demonstrated involvement in front-end innovation, consumer insights, or new product development

Nice To Haves

Master's degree welcome but not required.
Innovation mindset: comfortable with ambiguity and able to connect insights to opportunity spaces
Maker mindset: excited to jump into a new project and not afraid to get their hands dirty
Comfort in field environments: people's homes, garages, and job sites
Experience with durable goods, physical products, or hands-on consumer categories is a plus
Collaborative contributors who bring outside experience and interests to brainstorms
Cross-functional communicators who can bridge consumer insights and engineering teams

Responsibilities

Lead scoping and discovery research to understand consumer needs, behaviors, and pain points, including in-home and in-field ethnography, in-depth interviews, and contextual inquiry in the real environments where people live and work
Synthesize research into clear, compelling insights and bring them to life through storytelling and sessions that build genuine consumer empathy across engineering, design, and product teams
Partner with concept teams to translate insights into opportunity spaces, facilitating work sessions that move from what consumers need to what we could build
Evaluate and downselect concepts from the consumer lens, helping the team focus on ideas that solve real problems
Take concepts into field with real users to evaluate early prototypes, iterate based on honest feedback, and validate that the solution actually works
Synthesize and document learnings at the end of each project and hand off insights to engineering and product development teams to inform what gets built
Contribute to building a network of engaged consumers who can participate in ongoing research, co-creation, and feedback sessions over time