Staff Researcher, Product Research & Insights -Slack

Salesforce•San Francisco, CA

19h

About The Position

Slack is seeking a Staff Researcher to investigate how people and teams adopt, collaborate with, and delegate work to AI agents, and how agents affect workplace collaboration. The research will examine individual experiences as well as shared context, coordination, communication, trust, and accountability across teams. Findings will help identify where agents create value, where they introduce friction or risk, and how Slack can better support collaboration among people and agents. This Staff-level individual contributor will independently shape and execute a research agenda focused primarily on Slack's Ecosystem. The role combines foundational research on emerging work practices with practical evaluation of product experiences, translating evidence into recommendations that influence product strategy and development. It also includes mentoring researchers and strengthening how the team conducts and applies research.

Requirements

At least 8 years of user or product research experience, or equivalent demonstrated experience delivering research at comparable scope and impact.
A track record of independently leading ambiguous research across multiple product teams.
Expertise in multiple research approaches, with strong qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis skills and sound judgment about methodological trade-offs.
Experience translating research into product strategy, roadmap priorities, or consequential product decisions in a fast-moving product organization.
Strong synthesis, storytelling, and communication skills, including partnering with senior stakeholders and creating frameworks that help teams understand and act on evidence.
Strong cross-functional collaboration and mentoring skills.
Working fluency in AI assistants and agents, and curiosity about their effects on real workplace behavior.

Nice To Haves

Research experience with AI assistants, agents, automation, or human–AI interaction, including delegation, oversight, trust, explainability, or recovery from errors.
Experience studying workplace collaboration, enterprise SaaS, knowledge workers, or multi-person and organizational workflows.
Experience with longitudinal studies, diary studies, contextual inquiry, or field research capturing how emerging tools become part of everyday work.
Experience partnering with Data Science to connect observed behaviors and customer needs with usage data and product evaluation.
Experience researching enterprise adoption, administrator needs, governance, or adoption barriers for emerging technologies.

Responsibilities

Lead research scoping, prioritization, and roadmapping across multiple teams focused on AI agents and workplace collaboration, turning ambiguous questions into actionable research programs.
Study real-world workflows to understand how people discover, adopt, delegate to, supervise, and collaborate with agents, and how those behaviors affect team coordination, shared understanding, trust, and accountability.
Design and conduct rigorous foundational and evaluative research using qualitative and quantitative methods, balancing depth, speed, and methodological limitations.
Partner with Product, Design, Engineering, Data Science, and other insights functions to connect customer evidence with product decisions and triangulate findings across research, behavioral data, and customer feedback.
Build narratives and reusable frameworks that synthesize multiple lines of inquiry, identify product opportunities, and clarify user and business consequences.
Influence senior stakeholders with evidence-based recommendations and help teams distinguish emerging signals from assumptions and prioritize important uncertainties.
Mentor colleagues and work with Research Operations to improve research practices, tools, documentation, and efficient delivery of high-quality work.