UX Researcher

About Obie

Obie is an insurance technology company, hyper-focused on driving value for the modern real estate investor and the partners they work with every day. Whether an owner, lender, agent, or property manager, Obie’s mission is to build technology and insurance products that drive efficiency and fundamentally change the way insurance is bought and sold.

As the industry leader in embedded and instant insurance products, Obie was recently honored as Business Insurance Best Places to Work and one of Inc Magazine's Fastest Growing Companies for 2022. Obie is one of a small number of companies that are both a Y-Combinator and NAR REACH accelerator alum. 

To date, Obie has raised $13.7 million from leading proptech investors including Battery Ventures, Thomvest Ventures, MetaProp, Second Century Ventures, and Funders Club. The company has two offices, one in Chicago, IL and the other in Sarasota, FL, but also offers employees the option to work remotely.

Obie is looking for a passionate, talented UX researcher to join us who will live, breathe, and advocate for UX research across Obie. You’ll be leading diverse and complex UX research projects, while also working to identify the next big opportunities alongside product designers and product leaders. You’ll be challenged to think outside the box, and grow in areas that you value. You’ll actively shape how we think, conduct, and grow UX Research within our rapidly growing product team on a daily basis.

Applicant must be based in the US or Canada.

About the Job

First and foremost, we're looking for people who are excited about what we're doing—you don't need to know anything about real estate insurance, but should be excited to learn. We're building in an entirely new space with many user challenges, so you'll be able to use creativity to help us solve problems and delight our customers.

As our third hire on the design team, you'll be responsible for a wide surface area with primary focus on current user experience throughout the product. You will investigate user behaviour and user needs with currently implemented tools and new research methods such as usability testing, in-depth interviews, and surveys by designing and conducting foundational and evaluative research to guide product decision-making. You will also be responsible for implementing new tools to deepen our user analysis. Working closely with the Product team - you should be able to combine your skills in behavioural research design, thematic analysis, and mental model mapping to drive product strategy and improve the user experience.

What You'll Do:

• Develop knowledge and empathy of our customers and a strong UX perspective on what would most serve them.
• Prioritize and conduct research that varies in approach, scale, scope, timeframe and methodologies across multiple work streams, making sure to work on the right project at the right time.
• Take on complex tasks and transform them into intuitive, accessible and easy-to-use designs alongside our Senior UI designer.
• Investigate user behaviour, needs, and motivations using empirical qualitative or mixed-methods research methods to improve user experience.
• Envision how people experience our products and bring that vision to life in a way that feels inspired, refined, and even magical.
• Select and communicate the appropriate method or mix of data collection methods (ranging from usability testing, diary studies, semi-structured interviews, participatory workshops, surveys, and everything in between) to answer questions for product teams and our broader company.
• Partner with product managers to help define a roadmap that directs the entire product team. Work closely with engineers and product managers to build, iterate on, and ship concepts.
• Extract meaning from qualitative and survey data sets through appropriate analyses, including the creation and application of qualitative codebooks.
• Build video summaries of interviews and experiences of users to illustrate findings with user voices.
• Make smart tradeoffs between rapid prototyping to test our hypotheses vs. longer-term design systems that will serve as a foundation for our best in class customer experience.
• Proactively communicate and share research findings with product teams, executives, and other audiences in compelling, actionable, and engaging ways.

What You'll Bring:

• None of these are requirements, but do describe the kinds of people that we think would be most effective at Obie right now.
• Love thinking broadly about problems to think creatively about how to solve them efficiently.
• Understand the strengths and shortcomings of different qualitative research methods, including when and how to apply them during each product phase.
• Worked remotely before, or know that you'd work well with a remote team.
• Happy to try things out to validate new features, and move on if they no longer solve a problem.
• Preference for ambiguity, open-ended problems.
• Excited for a front-row seat into a fast growing, early stage company. Things will change a lot!
• Enjoy thinking through trade-offs, with both mindfulness of short-term needs and our long-term direction.
• Experience utilizing various research design methods (i.e. usability studies, contextual inquiry, surveys, etc.)
• Relevant product research experience, either in an end-to-end, usability, or generative setting.
• Comfortable in a highly-technical environment; ability to engage with quantitative stakeholders and understand quantitative findings and materials.
• Familiarity with both quantitative and qualitative research methods.
• 5+ years of experience.

Interview Process

We want you at your best, and won't be giving you any gotcha-style questions - we aren't like that. We want to get to know you, hear about what you're interested in, and learn about what you hope to do in the future.

You should familiarize yourself with these resources before continuing:

a. Our company’s blog) to learn more about the space we’re working in, where we write about landlord insurance.

b. Check out our Twitter and LinkedIn to get a glimpse of how people interact with our brand and product.

c. Some posts with and about us around the web (Commercial Observer, Estate Innovation, Geek Estate Blog, Business Wire))

d. Podcast appearances: (The Ryan Hanley Show, REM #22) 

1. Meet us and learn about Obie

You'll first talk to Kara, Rebecca, and/or Adam) on a 30 minute call; you won't need to prepare anything in advance. The goal of this conversation is to get to know you and mutually explore if we might be a good fit for each other. You'll learn more about Obie and have a chance to ask any questions about our company, team, culture, and product.

1. Meet the team

Since you'll be joining a close-knit team, we'll ask you to meet other people in the company so we get to know each other a bit better.

1. Project exercise

This role requires strong planning, analytical, design, and communication skills, so we'll also present you with a short exercise to complete to provide you a chance to flex those muscles. You will be able to complete this exercise on your own time, so please be thorough and use the resources available to you. We'll be looking to see your problem solving abilities, writing and communication skills, empathy, general demeanour, and ability to leverage key design and research tools. More on this when you get there!

Obie has you covered

Being in the insurance industry, we understand the importance of comprehensive benefits for you and your family. These are just some of the benefits and perks we provide:

Competitive salary

Flexible time off with an encouraged minimum time away to support a healthy work-life balance

12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave

Great health, dental and vision coverage

Life Insurance

Flexible Spending & Health Savings Accounts

Stock Options

401k match

Pet Insurance Reimbursement

Equipment budget - everything you need to do your best work

Professional development support

Company off-sites to support team development (as COVID allows)

Summer hours

Company Size: 51 - 250 People

Year Founded: 2018

Country: United States