Staff Product Researcher

Role overview

As a Staff Product Researcher at KOHO Financial, you will lead research that uncovers user needs and insights across the end-to-end financial customer experience. You’ll partner with Product Design, Product Management, Engineering, Data, and Leadership to ensure research directly informs product decisions and strategy.

You will also help build and scale a research practice at KOHO, including standards, templates, and research operations, while mentoring cross-functional partners on research thinking.

Key missions

• Lead high-impact research across multiple product areas to clarify complex opportunity spaces and help teams identify the right problems to solve.
• Support product strategy and roadmap decisions by uncovering:
  • user needs and behavioral patterns
  • unmet opportunities
  • moments of friction across the customer journey
• Build scalable research practice foundations, including rituals, templates, repositories, recruitment approaches, and ways of working.

Responsibilities

• Translate raw signals into strategic insight, and strategic insight into practical action.
• Choose appropriate research methods based on decision needs, timeline, and constraints.
• Communicate clearly and persuasively to different audiences, from product teams to executives.
• Improve how research happens by creating systems (e.g., research ops, standards, tools, and templates).
• Influence without formal authority and build trust across disciplines.

Requirements

• Experience operating at staff or senior-leadership IC level, influencing product strategy across multiple teams/domains.
• Deep expertise in qualitative research, with the ability to combine qualitative findings with quantitative inputs when appropriate.
• Strong ability to tackle high-ambiguity, consumer-facing digital products.
• Proven track record of influencing product strategy, positioning, messaging, or go-to-market through research.
• Experience building or scaling research programs, participant communities, or research operations systems.
• Comfort balancing user needs, business constraints, compliance, and technical complexity.
• Familiarity with using modern AI tools to increase speed and leverage, with strong judgment on quality, privacy, and interpretation.
• Passion for understanding real people and delivering products that create meaningful value.
• Experience in fintech, banking, credit, payments, or other trust-sensitive consumer domains.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience creating or scaling participant/recruitment approaches and end-to-end research operating systems.
• Demonstrated ability to build research tooling, templates, and repositories as part of research practice scaling.