SVP, Research & Insights - Experience & Design Org

Salesforce•San Francisco, CA

13d•Hybrid

About The Position

The next Salesforce will be shaped by how well people and agents can understand one another, share context, delegate authority, recover from failure, and accomplish meaningful outcomes together. These behaviors unfold across roles, products, implementations, data, policies, channels, and time. They cannot be understood through episodic studies or a single adoption metric. The SVP, Research + Insights will lead Research across Salesforce Experience Design and build a continuous intelligence capability spanning Customer 360, Platform, Data 360, Agentforce, Slack, and emerging surfaces. Reporting to the EVP, Chief Experience Officer, this executive will move Research further upstream into enterprise and product strategy while extending evaluation through implementation, production, and longitudinal use.

Requirements

A record of leading Research across a complex, multi-product enterprise, platform, or ecosystem at significant scale.
Evidence that research you personally led changed product strategy, architecture, investment, operating decisions, or shipped experiences, not merely stakeholder understanding.
Deep expertise across qualitative research, behavioral science, mixed methods, experimentation, measurement, and interpretation of product and production data.
Meaningful experience with AI, automation, human factors, intelligent systems, trust, or human-machine collaboration.
The ability to reconstruct how complex domains and people actually work across roles, systems, incentives, constraints, implementations, and time.
Demonstrated strength in foundational research, generative product influence, continuous evaluation, and enterprise synthesis.
Experience integrating qualitative, quantitative, behavioral, commercial, implementation, and service evidence without overstating certainty or confusing correlation with customer understanding.
Executive presence and organizational courage sufficient to challenge powerful stakeholders, protect difficult findings, and redirect consequential decisions.
Experience leading a centrally connected research organization with senior portfolio leaders and deeply embedded teams.
A record of identifying, recruiting, and developing exceptional research leaders and distinguished practitioners.

Responsibilities

Establish one enterprise Research + Insights agenda tied to Salesforce's most consequential customer, product, platform, architecture, and business decisions.
Build Experience Intelligence as a live, cumulative understanding of how customers, industries, organizations, roles, and work actually operate and how they change over time.
Ensure foundational, generative, and evaluative research shape product strategy before solution direction and roadmap commitments harden.
Create a continuous evaluation system spanning early concepts, working prototypes, implementations, shipped products, production behavior, and longitudinal customer outcomes.
Define the research and measurement models Salesforce needs for human-agent collaboration, including trust, delegation, autonomy, authority, observability, intervention, correction, escalation, learning, and recovery.
Integrate relevant evidence across Product Analytics, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Support, Services, Trust, implementation, and market intelligence without duplicating those organizations or collapsing distinct evidence into one score.
Build a durable knowledge system that makes customer and product evidence searchable, reusable, appropriately contextualized, and available at the moment consequential decisions are made.
Protect the independence and integrity of customer evidence, including confidence, limitations, contradictions, and unresolved questions, even when the findings challenge a committed direction.
Recruit and develop an exceptional bench of research leaders, distinguished researchers, behavioral scientists, measurement experts, research technologists, knowledge architects, and Research Operations talent.