ADP is hiring a Lead User Experience Researcher to join the team working on ADP's next-generation SMB HCM/Payroll platform. You will extract market and behavioral truth via a robust research roadmap, translating evidence into product, business, and strategic impact. You will ensure a high capacity and high value research agenda that reveals critical insights through testing and learning. User and market truth is the essential ingredient that will enable the product to move with growing confidence toward commercial scale.
Your mandate: own the research agenda supporting the product's evolution, running end-to-end programs (from research framing to synthesis, not just fieldwork mechanics) and ensuring evidence steers both design priorities and executive alignment.
What you'll do:- Define, prioritize, and drive the research agenda to expose user needs, segment risks, and critical workflow gaps. Adapt scope and methodologies as the context shifts with various phases of SDLC, from concept explorations to scaled pilots and post-launch feedback initiatives.
- Run ambiguous and experimental research, with emphasis on ML and GenAI-powered features where novel methodologies and logistics may be required to achieve the learning goals.
- Co-own and operationalize the team's Generative UX workstream: scope, plan, and run immersive client/user visits that include SBS and Innovation Lab team members.
- Connect user data to business, product roadmap, and engineering choices. Make findings actionable, not just insightful.
- Plan and run end to end studies: design the learning agenda, screeners and guides, recruit, execute qualitative/quantitative/generative/evaluative studies.
- Build clear, defensible, evidence-driven analysis and findings narratives that can withstand pressure-testing and critique from various audiences, from engineering ICs to senior business and technology executives.
- Identify when the research arc is misaligned with business or roadmap constraints. Spot strategic gaps and risks, identify mitigation strategies, and propose recommendations.
- Exemplify best practices, open-mindedness, a love of collaboration, grace under pressure, and an action orientation with your peers and the cross-functional roles around you. Bring to life best-in-class standards among our user research team and the broader ADP user research community.
- Take nothing at face value: stress-test signals, challenge consensus, and tenaciously pursue evidence and proof from the market.
Requirements:- A Bachelor's degree or equivalent in relevant experience.
- 5+ years of firsthand research experience and skills gained and developed in the same or similar roles.
- Expertise across the UX research toolkit: from exploratory and generative work to rapid usability and evaluative methods (interviews, surveys, analytics, prototype testing, workflow observation, etc.).
- Track record of delivering clear, actionable research in complex, highly regulated industries. Ability to translate technical and behavioral data for the spectrum of our market (DIY micro-SMBs to upmarket SMBs with larger workforces and more complex needs, as well as COI personas).
- Demonstrate creativity and rigor in research involving emerging technology (ML/GenAI). Creative problem-solving to invent or adapt new research methods where standard ones prove insufficient. Unafraid to experiment and fail to increase the pace and volume of learning.
- Successfully, productively integrated GenAI / LLM tooling into your professional workflows and are on top of the latest developments with this technology.
- Effective with current technical platforms and tools (Figma, Dovetail, UserInterviews, Qualtrics, Maze, etc.), but not bound by process. Bias for action: a willingness to apply unorthodox methods to move things forward is an asset.
- Precise, unsentimental, direct communication, but tailored to varying audiences: exec, peer, business, and technical.
- Both naturally optimistic, but inherently skeptical. Thrive and even driven by ambiguity. When encountering conflicting or uncertain signals, integrate as evidence to refine the research plan, not view as blockers.
- Experience collaborating and influencing in distributed, multi-team environments; able to handle friction without noise or drama.
- Plus if you possess an advanced degree in HF/HCI, psych, or related discipline, but academics alone are not a substitute for commercial and strategic judgment built over years of experience.
