UX Research Program Manager

Photon is seeking a UX Research Program Manager to shape how user insights inform product decisions and to scale research operations across the organization. This onsite role in New York, NY will drive governance, tooling, vendor partnerships, and impact reporting to spread the voice of users throughout design and product teams. The position offers a salary range of USD 52,000 to 182,000 per year and requires a Bachelor's degree with at least 3 years of relevant experience.

Responsibilities

• Develop a clear understanding of the UX research team's priorities and how their work aligns with the broader UX and design strategy.
• Partner with UX teams to scale programs from planning to delivery, optimizing resources, timelines, and budget investments.
• Identify risks early and craft mitigation plans to minimize impact, adjusting strategy as needed.
• Operate cross‑business‑line research programs to amplify user voices across products with consistency and efficiency.
• Oversee the development and maintenance of templates, screener instruments, access controls, and training to ensure consistency across teams using these tools.
• Own the development and maintenance of best practices for a research repository, including storage, tagging, sharing, and communication of insights across the Design organization.
• Track how UX research informs product and design improvements and translate that impact into ROI metrics.
• Produce regular leadership reports and summaries detailing activity, impact, methods used, gaps, and hurdles to ensure representation across the organization.
• Manage vendor partnerships to ensure smooth onboarding and ongoing use, collecting regular feedback to assess each partnership's effectiveness.
• Champion research team culture initiatives to foster cohesion.
• Lead recurring stakeholder updates, acting as a bridge between UX Research and cross‑functional teams and leaders.
• Promote the value of user research across the organization by sharing, socializing, and evangelizing its impact.
• Scale research operations by codifying repeatable processes and best practices.
• Conduct user recruitment screening for both moderated and unmoderated studies.
• Provide templates for generative and evaluative research methods.
• Establish best practices for measuring research impact.
• Manage user panels and research tools, streamlining access.
• Create and maintain internal resources to standardize workflows and vendor capabilities, including guides, templates, and briefs.
• Oversee participant recruitment activities, including vendor outreach and building a directory of participants.
• Lead the rollout of partner toolkits to scale self-service research beyond the UX Research Team when appropriate.
• Jira expertise preferred.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in UX research operations.
• 3+ years of experience leading end-to-end UX research projects for large, cross-functional teams.
• Experience managing research operations such as recruiting, scheduling, and vendor management.
• Experience socializing and evangelizing research and its impact.
• Extremely detail-oriented with a strong focus on defining processes.
• Proactive self-starter with excellent follow-up skills.
• Experience working with UX Research teams across multiple methods and activities, spanning both qualitative and quantitative disciplines.
• Experience with workstreams including user recruitment and scheduling, panel management, vendor management, policy and legal governance, backlog/pipeline prioritization, impact tracking, and knowledge management systems/portals.
• Experience developing and maintaining team resources and communications, including templates, playbooks, and training calendars.
• Passion for planning, tracking, organizing logistics, process, details, and documentation.
• Advanced project management and execution skills.
• Excellent communicator with clear and proactive intake and outputs.
• Ability to operate effectively in a large, matrixed organization.
• Knowledge of user experience measurement and KPI setting.
• Experience escalating issues, making trade-offs, balancing constraints, and communicating risk.
• Understanding of UX design and common design processes.
• Experience collaborating with designers, product managers, and engineers in multidisciplinary teams.
• Experience with forecasting and budgeting.
• Experience with research and design in Agile/Scrum environments.
• Proficiency with Qualtrics, UserZoom, EnjoyHQ, and other common research platforms.
• Jira expertise preferred.

Technologies

• Qualtrics
• UserZoom
• EnjoyHQ
• Jira

Benefits

• Medical, vision, and dental benefits
• 401k retirement plan
• Variable pay/incentives
• Paid time off
• Paid holidays