Senior User Researcher at Tala (formerly InVenture)

The Senior User Researcher will work from Kenya and be part of Tala’s global Insights team. The mission of Tala’s Insights team is to drive a collaborative process to generate trustworthy insights that lead to empathy-fueled action. As a member of the Insights team, our senior user researcher in Kenya will:

• Contribute meaningfully to the growth of Tala’s Kenya business by ensuring a deep shared understanding of our customers’ daily lives, attitudes, and behaviors.
• Provide insights into experimental new product development, competitive analysis, current product improvements, and customer financial health. 
• Implement best practices in human-centered design techniques and mixed research methods.

What you'll do:

• Conducting user research studies or consumer research and analyzing the data collected, generate insights that influence how product teams think about medium and long-term product strategy
• Lead end-to-end mixed method research activities such as field studies, interviews, diary studies, participatory workshops, ethnography, surveys, usability, concept  testing, and logs analysis – including driving research objectives, hypotheses, methodology, execution, analysis, and communication
• Defining research questions and selecting appropriate methods of data collection to deliver stakeholder-relevant value at any stage of business and timelines for finishing research projects
• Identifying top priorities to improve customer experience then align with the business for prioritization, e.g what will create pain relievers for our customers
• Collaborating with UX designers and product managers to improve current product and innovation opportunities by understanding research needs Work with data team to query and synthesize insights that support designers’ or product managers’ hypotheses
• Manage through ambiguity, work autonomously, and multitask in a fast-paced environment

What you'll need:

• Bachelor’s Degree or Master’s Degree in Business, Economics, Market Research, International Development, or Social Sciences (Psychology, Communications, Anthropology, Sociology)
• 5+ years of experience in market research or user research inside innovative consumer fintech, financial, mobile or digital companies
• Empathy, knowledge and a deep desire to improve the lives of low- to middle-income financially underserved Kenyans.
• Familiarity with consumer financial products and services and the general fintech landscape in Kenya
• Natural collaborator and influencer with experience working cross-functionally with Product, Design, Credit, Data Analytics, and Marketing/Growth team members in Kenya and abroad. 
• Demonstrated ability to provide valuable insights through mastery of human-centered design techniques and mixed research methods: surveys, interviews, focus groups, concept testing, usability testing, A/B testing, etc. 
• Strong organizational and project management skills, including planning logistics, coordinating activities with various team members and flexibly adapting to changes.
• Experience with communicating complex ideas or context in a clear, data-informed, and action-oriented style.
• Fluent in English and Swahili.