Senior Research Manager in London

Join us as Senior Research Manager. We’re searching for a Senior Research Manager to head up our research function at NatWest Boxed. You’ll work under one of our Product Directors, enjoying a high degree of trust and empowerment to set the direction of the research function. Your team will lead research across NatWest Boxed (our B2B2C Embedded Finance Business) and Mettle (our award-winning neobank for small businesses).

You’ll be running a small team of sharp, accomplished User Researchers, shaping the priorities, ways of working, and direction of the function. You’ll draw on your experiences to inspire the team and the business to achieve first-class results, ensuring an exceptionally high-quality bar and maintaining a competitive edge in the market.

You’ll be the company-wide ambassador for customer‑centricity, establishing frameworks that couple research strategy tightly to business goals, while educating and supporting the wider organization. You’ll work closely with customer-facing (ops, sales) and customer-focused (product, design) functions to understand our customers, helping leadership have a cohesive understanding to ensure they are making the right strategic bets.

What you’ll do:

• Overseeing the holistic research roadmap and managing associated budgets, balancing future-looking discovery work with evaluative experiments that optimize live products.
• Steer research across two distinct business lines, seamlessly guiding your team to understand enterprise partners and their customers, empathizing with the daily realities of sole traders.
• You’ll be the coach and quality gate for your team, helping researchers hone their craft across complex generative discovery and rigorous evaluative methods.
• Advocating for the irreplaceable value of deep human insight, pushing the business to understand underlying customer emotions and tying them back to product design and commercial opportunity.
• Set your team up for success to navigate a growing organisation, shaping the tools and process (ResearchOps) to make research effective and scalable.
• Establishing robust frameworks, setting the gold standard for independent research, and fostering a culture of experimentation across all product and design squads.
• Influencing and guiding executive-level stakeholders through articulating the business implications of your research and communicating the strategic direction of the function.
• Acting as the heartbeat of the customer for the business, encouraging teams to start with customers in everything they do, and delivering improvements in independent research methodologies.
• Evolving the research function, staying at the cutting edge of emerging trends, and building scalable ResearchOps tools.
• Opinionated about what ‘good’ research looks like, and where the craft is heading. Eager to try new practices whilst maintaining research rigour.

The skills you’ll need:

• Deeply versed across research frameworks (including Jobs to Be Done), with the judgment to empower the team to select the right approach for each problem.
• Deep experience with mixed-methods research, encompassing complex qualitative and quantitative analysis, and the ability to coach teams to bring different data streams together into a cohesive story.
• A proven track record of driving business results, demonstrating how your team's research has led to tangible, positive outcomes and improved product performance as well as business outcomes/metrics.
• Experience leading dynamic research teams as a natural coach, ensuring team members constantly hone their craft and synthesize data into compelling business narratives.
• Ability to take action and ownership of ambiguous topics, bringing teams together, creating alignment and driving change.
• Understanding of the unique challenges B2B research brings, and the impact research has had within SaaS.

We’ll also be looking for:

• Practical experience integrating emerging AI tools and modern workflows into a research practice to drive team efficiency and enable research beyond the team.
• The ability to thrive with high autonomy, shaping the future of a research function integral to two rapidly changing businesses.