UX Research & Insights Director

We’re looking for a UX Research & Insights Director to lead our growing team of researchers and establish our strategic vision for player insight driven decision making across Rovio.


As the UX Research & Insights Director at Rovio, you will leverage your passion for games and user research, helping Game Teams and Marketing understand their audience to create the most marketable, intuitive, accessible, and engaging games in the industry!


In this Director level role, you will have the opportunity to work across all of Rovio’s studios to influence the entire Rovio portfolio, with a focus on genre mastery. Reporting into the VP of Marketing, you will work closely with many parts of the organisation including leadership, studio management, game leads, BI, marketing, design, UX design, UA, brand, developers, external research platforms, community and legal.


Through your team you will help influence and inform business strategy and game decisions at all stages of development, by driving qualitative and quantitative research, ensuring insights and strategic recommendations are delivered to key stakeholders.


The players' experience comes first at Rovio, so in this critical role your job will be to drive a ‘players first’ mindset across the company by understanding the market, championing the player and driving user centric ways of working.


Ultimately your role will be to inspire positive change to help grow our UX maturity and player centric design at Rovio.


Responsibilities
Manage Rovio’s Player Insights and UX Strategy team, including resources and budgeting.
Ability to coach and grow our team of researchers & strategists towards excellence, ensuring assignments are appropriately matched to teams skill sets and strengths.
Deep UX research craft experience with a skill for communicating with leaders from every craft and the ability to drive UX vision in a highly strategic and tactical way.
Ability to develop, pitch and execute on a research strategy, delivering insights & strategic recommendations to stakeholders.
Lead the UX research craft, culture and methods across the company and support knowledge sharing.
Recruit, manage and mentor the UX research team in tools, best practices, processes, techniques, methodology and ensure the craft keeps developing.
Review deliverables and share learnings across the company.
Work closely with studio leadership and key stakeholders to align on goals and priorities.
Supporting Market Insights on understanding gaming markets and trend analyses, focused on factors from business performances to the evolution of gamer behaviors and tool analysis improvements.
Staying on the alert for emerging global trends and developments in the gaming industry.
Be a strong voice and advocate for the player and drive user centric ways of working across the company.
Educate studios on core user experience principles, and drive a user focused mindset across the company.
Investigate, evaluate and recommend new UX research techniques, technologies, methodologies and process improvements.
Actively influence, prioritize and make recommendations for studies and findings to team members and studio management.



Who we think will do great in this role has:
Leadership: A strong influencer to push forward player insights to key stakeholders. Define and deploy the vision and strategy of the research team, and build a strong business case to fully integrate insights into game development, market approach and company strategy.
Team Management: A team player with experience in managing and growing a research team, including recruiting, staff planning, mentoring, empowering and leading the team to make greater business impact
Gaming Knowledge: Deep knowledge and passion of mobile game development throughout its life cycle and solid understanding of mobile gaming market as well as mobile gamers
Research Experience: Extensive knowledge of research methods in a business environment, and a proven ability to translate findings into actionable product improvements
Communication: Excellent interpersonal communication, both written and verbal, especially in communicating with key stakeholders and building a close relationship with cross-functional teams, e.g. game development, marketing, data intelligence.



Mixing the world-class expertise of six different crafts – Product Marketing, User Acquisition, User Experience Research, Market Intelligence, Marketing Video Production, and Player Experience, our team’s main mission is to fuel the growth of our games portfolio.
Largely embedded within game teams and in close collaboration with a large variety of stakeholders, our role is to identify, anticipate and make sure to satisfy our target audiences’ needs and wants. We do this across all touchpoints – from early research on new concepts, to how we reach out to millions of players through our marketing campaigns, or to how we engage them through our social networks and other discussion platforms.


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We welcome applicants to use the name they want to be addressed by in the application form, regardless of whether it is their legal name.