Senior Consumer Insights & Innovation Lead

Trek•Waterloo, WI

1d•Onsite

About The Position

The Senior Consumer Insights & Innovation Lead helps Trek identify what riders and potential customers will need next and determine which opportunities are worth pursuing. The role builds and champions a strategic research approach connecting emerging rider behaviors, unmet needs, market signals, and customer value to future product opportunities. Working at the intersection of Research, Design, and Product Management, the lead identifies and investigates opportunities, partners with designers as concepts take shape, tests what matters to customers, and brings evidence and implications to Product teams’ investment decisions. This is a senior individual-contributor position with broad influence and a high degree of ownership. The role is onsite at Trek’s headquarters in Waterloo, Wisconsin. The successful candidate will establish a credible, repeatable approach to discovering future rider needs and producing stronger evidence for physical and digital product investments. Over the first 18 months, this includes establishing the Research and Design operating model, opportunity discovery framework, customer access, and external research partner network; investigating high-potential opportunities; supporting concept and value validation; and identifying meaningful product opportunities, including ones that may attract new customers, command premium value, or prevent investment in weaker ideas.

Requirements

At least 7 years of experience in consumer research, strategic insights, innovation, product strategy, product management, or a closely related field.
Strong qualitative and behavioral research skills, including interviewing, observation, synthesis, and opportunity framing.
Strong quantitative literacy and experience developing or evaluating concept testing, purchase intent, willingness-to-pay, segmentation, demand sizing, or similar research.
Demonstrated ability to connect customer evidence, market signals, and business considerations to product or innovation opportunities.
Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills, including the ability to distill complex information into clear points of view for senior stakeholders.
Proven ability to work closely with designers and product managers while maintaining research independence, rigor, and objectivity.
Curiosity, comfort with ambiguity, proactivity in identifying questions worth investigating, and willingness to challenge conventional thinking with evidence.
Ability and interest in exploring how A.I. can enhance, simplify, and redesign workflows and tools.
Ability to travel internationally and within the U.S. as needed for research, fieldwork, team collaboration, and customer engagement.

Nice To Haves

Experience in consumer products, sports, outdoor, mobility, lifestyle, or another category where understanding changing consumer behavior is central to product success; this experience is preferred but not required.

Responsibilities

Identify emerging rider behaviors, unmet needs, changing expectations, and emerging customer groups before they become obvious to the market.
Combine primary research with market research, trend analysis, competitive intelligence, social and community analysis, and available behavioral or business data to develop a point of view.
Frame opportunity areas so Design and Product understand the customer, what is changing, why it matters, and what may be worth building.
Build and maintain an opportunity pipeline that helps Trek look beyond the current product roadmap.
Own research strategy, methodology, decision metrics, and rigor for opportunity discovery and validation, in partnership with Design and Product.
Select the appropriate mix of qualitative, quantitative, observational, behavioral, and secondary research for each question.
Create research plans, briefs, hypotheses, and decision criteria focused on learning that can affect a business or product decision.
Engage external research partners and specialists when specialized expertise is required, including for sophisticated quantitative work, fieldwork, international research, segmentation, or pricing.
Conduct or lead interviews, observation, field research, concept conversations, and other direct research with riders, non-Trek riders, and potential customers in new categories.
Investigate what customers do, the problems they work around, what they value, and what motivates them to spend.
Partner with Design and Product on selected field research and synthesize findings into actionable opportunity definitions.
Lead cross-functional observational research, including collaborative workshops and synthesis activities.
Partner with Design during concept development and translate customer needs into testable hypotheses.
Design and lead research to assess what customers value, choose, reject, and consider meaningfully differentiated.
Assess commercial potential using measures such as customer importance, purchase intent, choice behavior, willingness to pay, likely behavior growth, and potential to attract new customers.
Communicate confidence levels and identify what is known, uncertain, and still needs to be learned before further investment.
Connect research findings to product strategy, business opportunity, and portfolio choices.
Present evidence, implications, and recommendations clearly to Product leaders, Design leaders, and executives.
Challenge assumptions when evidence does not support a proposed direction and help teams stop, redirect, or strengthen ideas before significant investment.
Establish a repeatable process for identifying emerging behaviors and translating them into product opportunities.
Build lightweight research infrastructure, such as a rider or customer panel, research repository, research partner network, standard methods, and reusable research and opportunity assessment tools.
Help establish a common language and decision framework for assessing hypotheses and opportunities at different stages of validation and investment readiness.
Help shape the future research organization as its capabilities expand into digital experiences and additional regions.