Role Description

At KOHO, we’re building products that help Canadians make meaningful financial progress. As a Staff Product Researcher, you will play a leadership role on our Individual Contributor track, helping the organization better understand user needs, behaviours, motivations, and barriers across the full financial journey.

This is a highly strategic, hands-on role for someone who can move fluidly between deep discovery work and practice-building. You will partner closely with Product Design, Product Management, Engineering, Data, SLT and cross-functional stakeholders to shape what we build, why we build it, and how we know it matters.

You’ll bring human-centric thinking into the product development, with a primary focus on Generative Research, whilst building the systems for Evaluative research at scale. You’ll also help KOHO level up how research is run: improving our methods, systems, tooling, recruiting practices, and research operations so that insight can scale with the business.

We’re looking for someone who is equally excited by two things: influencing product strategy at a high level, and building the research foundations that allow teams to move faster with more conviction.

What You’ll Do

• Lead high-impact research across multiple product areas, helping teams identify the right problems to solve and bringing clarity to complex opportunity spaces.
• Support product strategy and roadmap decisions by uncovering user needs, behavioural patterns, unmet opportunities, and moments of friction across the end-to-end customer experience.
• Define strong research questions, determine the right methods for the job, and execute studies with a high bar for quality, speed, and usefulness.
• Use a range of methods such as in-depth interviews, usability studies, concept testing, surveys, diary studies, journey mapping, and foundational research.
• Synthesize findings into clear narratives, actionable insights, frameworks, and recommendations that influence teams and leadership.
• Help teams and leaders identify where qualitative insight, quantitative data, and market understanding should come together to inform product direction.
• Partner closely with designers, product managers, engineers, data partners, product marketers and Leadership to ensure research is embedded into decision-making rather than treated as a downstream check.
• Build the foundations of a scalable research practice at KOHO, including better rituals, templates, repositories, recruitment approaches, and ways of working.
• Improve research operations and participant recruitment, helping KOHO create more reliable, repeatable ways to learn from users over time.
• Mentor designers, product managers, and other cross-functional partners on research thinking, evidence quality, and user-centric decision-making.
• Raise the quality of discovery across the organization by coaching teams to ask better questions, avoid confirmation bias, and connect evidence back to business and user outcomes.
• Explore how AI-powered tools can responsibly accelerate research workflows such as synthesis, pattern detection, documentation, and knowledge sharing without compromising rigor or judgment.

Qualifications

• You bring significant experience in product research for consumer-facing digital products, ideally in complex, high-ambiguity environments.
• You have operated at a staff or senior-leadership IC level, influencing product strategy across multiple teams or domains.
• You are excellent at framing messy problems, identifying what needs to be learned, and choosing the right research method based on the decision, timeline, and constraints.
• You are deeply skilled in qualitative research and comfortable combining it with quantitative inputs when appropriate.
• You know how to go from raw signal to strategic insight, and from strategic insight to practical action.
• You communicate clearly and persuasively, adapting your storytelling to different audiences from product teams to executives.
• You are highly collaborative and know how to build trust across disciplines while influencing without formal authority.
• You care about craft, but you also care about systems. You don’t just deliver studies; you improve how research happens around you.
• You are energized by building structure where it does not yet exist, whether that means improving research ops, establishing standards, or creating better tools and templates.
• You are scrappy, thoughtful, and outcome-oriented. You know when to go deep, when to move fast, and how to balance rigor with momentum.
• You are passionate about understanding real people and using that understanding to help build products that create meaningful value in their lives.
• You are comfortable using modern AI tools to improve the speed and leverage of your work, while applying strong judgment around quality, privacy, and interpretation.

Nice to Have

• Experience in fintech, banking, credit, payments, or other trust-sensitive consumer domains.
• Experience building or scaling research programs, participant communities, or research operations systems.
• Experience working in environments where user needs, business constraints, compliance, and technical complexity must all be balanced.
• Experience influencing product positioning, messaging, or go-to-market strategy through research.

Salary

The budgeted salary range for this role is $160,000-180,000 CAD / year.

At KOHO, we are dedicated to providing pay transparency to all candidates. Compensation at KOHO is determined through various factors including but not limited to: comparable salary market data within Canada, technical skill assessment, a holistic view of previous work history, and internal pay equity with other KOHO team members.