Senior Consumer Insights & Innovation Lead

Trek•Waterloo, WI

5d•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. This senior individual-contributor role owns and champions a strategic research approach connecting emerging rider behaviors, unmet needs, market signals, and customer value to future product opportunities. The role works across Research, Design, and Product Management to investigate opportunities, collaborate with designers as concepts take shape, test what matters to customers, and provide Product teams with clear evidence and implications for investment decisions. The position is onsite at Trek’s headquarters in Waterloo, Wisconsin. The role establishes repeatable approaches to emerging-behavior discovery and opportunity validation, develops research infrastructure and partnerships, and builds shared decision frameworks. Over the first 18 months, the successful candidate is expected to establish the Research and Design operating model and opportunity discovery framework, investigate high-potential opportunities, support concept development and validation, and identify two to four meaningful product opportunities. These may include opportunities that competitors have not acted on, can attract new customers or command premium value, or where research has redirected or prevented investment in weaker ideas. The role will help shape a research capability that expands from physical products into digital experiences and additional regions.

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 worthwhile research questions, and willingness to challenge conventional thinking with evidence.
Openness to and interest in using A.I. to enhance, simplify, and redesign workflows and tools.
Ability to travel internationally and within the United States 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; preferred but not required.

Responsibilities

Identify emerging rider behaviors, unmet needs, changing expectations, and new customer groups.
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 to clarify the customer, what is changing, why it matters, and what may be worth building.
Build and maintain an opportunity pipeline beyond the current product roadmap.
Own research strategy, methodology, decision metrics, and rigor for opportunity discovery and validation, collaborating with Design and Product throughout.
Select appropriate qualitative, quantitative, observational, behavioral, and secondary research methods for each question.
Create research plans, briefs, hypotheses, and decision criteria focused on learning that can affect business or product decisions.
Engage external research partners and specialists when advanced quantitative work, specialized fieldwork, international research, segmentation, pricing, or other expertise is needed.
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 customer behavior, workarounds, values, problems, and spending motivations, beyond stated preferences.
Partner with Design and Product on field research and synthesize findings into actionable opportunity definitions.
Lead cross-functional observational research, including collaborative workshops and synthesis activities.
Partner with Design to translate customer needs into testable hypotheses as concepts are developed.
Design and lead research to determine what customers value, choose, reject, and see as meaningful differentiation.
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 distinguish 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 infrastructure such as a rider/customer panel, research repository, research partner network, standard methods, and reusable research and opportunity assessment tools.
Establish a common language and decision framework for evaluating 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.
Travel internationally and within the United States as needed for research, fieldwork, team collaboration, and customer engagement.