Join us in shaping the future of Amazon's revolutionary products! As a Principal Cultural Researcher on the Futures Insights team, which is part of Amazon's Devices and Services Design Group, you'll play a pivotal role in influencing mid-to-long term strategic planning for next-generation and net-new device and service innovations. Your research, which starts at Phase Zero, will help the organization situate emerging technologies within a deep understanding of enduring and emerging human needs, cultural trends, and broader systems (e.g., STEEP analysis). Our work begins at the start of the design process, identifying insights and opportunities to drive humanity-centered innovation throughout. We collaborate with a variety of teams and functions in our work, driving efforts that are at times embedded within futures concept explorations or independent of them.
We recognize that the combination of skills and experience required to do this work can take many forms. Maybe you're a design ethnographer, cultural anthropologist, futures researcher, strategic foresight analyst, design strategist, or user experience researcher with deep experience in the 0-1 product space? Either way, we'd love to hear from you if this role sounds exciting. This role is currently based in our Seattle studio.
Key job responsibilities
* Independently plan and execute global, in-field research programs on topics of strategic relevance to the organization, leading the output and activities of the project's lifecycle (e.g., screener development to final insight reports)
* Translate insights into inspiring design guidance (e.g., design directions, principles, scenarios), strategic frameworks, and other operational criteria aligned to business goals to drive adoption of the work
* Drive the development and scaling of mechanisms to help the team operationalize and optimize how we execute, socialize, and drive adoption of strategic cultural insights and trends work across multiple organizations and executive leaders within the Devices & Services leadership team
* Collaborate with Futures Design and other key partners to inform and shape mid-to-long term concept development and innovation roadmaps
* Help leadership determine the right research questions to ask, informing long-term research roadmaps that align with business strategy and goals
* Persuade decision-makers at all levels of the organization to take aligned action on research findings
* Define, invent, and execute research methods appropriate to the questions at hand, including but not limited to ethnographic, foresight, and survey techniques
* Act as a subject matter expert within the UXR team and the broader researcher community, mentoring researchers and helping to elevate their work, where necessary
A day in the life
In this role, you'll dive deep into understanding human needs, behaviors, motivations, and sociocultural trends to inform futures design explorations or broader organizational strategy. Your work will consist of two major types:
1) embedded within a cross-disciplinary team exploring new concepts (3-5 years out) and
2) driving independent foundational research programs around themes of strategic relevance to the organization.
To that end, your day-to-day might consist of:
* Closely partnering with the Futures Design team to shape concept development and innovation roadmaps.
* Leading in-home customer interviews in Brazil, talking to academic experts about social robotics, or exploring the fringes of cultures for emerging signals and trends.
* Creating the artifacts necessary to plan and deliver insights (e.g., screeners, discussion guides, insights reports), as well as artifacts and activities necessary to help activate them.
* Planning and facilitating workshops to help teams immerse in and design with the insights surfaced by your work.
* Working with the Head of Futures Insights and Futures Design leaders to invent new and optimize existing mechanisms to help the team execute global research faster and scale its outputs across multiple organizations across the Devices and Services organization.
About the team
The Futures Insights team is a research team within a larger user experience research (UXR) team inside Amazon's Devices and Services Design group. Our team is split across our Seattle and London studios. We draw on a variety of methods and disciplines to inform our work: strategic foresight, cultural analysis, ethnography, and design research methods. The Devices and Services UXR team is a collaborative group of ethnographers, psychologists, human factors researchers, and research scientists dedicated to providing deep insights into customer motivations and behaviors. The broader team's research supports multiple time horizons, with product line research teams influencing existing roadmaps and Futures Insights shaping the furthest out time horizons. Collectively, we work closely with the business and design to clarify opportunities, inspire innovation, and translate insights into operational outcomes.
