Director of Research & Strategy, Adobe Design

The opportunity

Adobe is looking for Director of Research & Strategy for the Document Cloud portfolio. You will lead a group of passionate and hard-working researchers/strategists who craft experiences across web, mobile, and desktop applications while using AI/ML technologies enabling individual and business productivity. Working closely with Design, Product and Engineering executives, you will provide strategic design and product direction, feedback to the design and engineering teams to uplevel craft, and find resolution to ambiguous problem spaces across the entire Document Cloud, including Acrobat, Signatures, and AI solutions.

What you’ll do

• Coach and mentor researchers, hire and attract top-notch talent to the team, and foster a culture where the researchers grow, learn and do their best work.
• Build a collaborative environment and encourage deep partnership with cross-functional teams, setting a high bar for research craft, and define and execute design strategy for redesigns, 1.0s, and lead all aspects of research execution across releases on multiple platforms.
• Contribute to the product strategy discussions through deep customer research and design partnerships to bring visions to life.
• Incite action in cross-functional partners to deliver better user and business outcomes.
• Guide the teams in weekly, monthly and quarterly product releases.

What you’ll need to succeed:

• 10+ years of equivalent practical experience of managing researchers and strategists, managing research leaders is a plus.
• Lead empathetically, fostering an inclusive and empowering environment for the research team to do innovative and impactful work
• Phenomenal oral and written communication skills are a pre-requisite.
• Articulate research findings and implications/strategy through solid, strategic presentations
• Be an effective facilitator across product-design-research-engineering teams in early stages of key projects.
• Deep expertise in strategic problem framing and solving problems
• Embody a learner and mentor mentality
• Champion for customer-centric and holistic design at all levels in the organization
• Experience working with executives on ambiguous problems and crafting big picture strategies driven by deep user understanding. Phenomenal oral and written communication skills are a pre-requisite.