About Homeward

Buying a home should be an exciting milestone. But all too often, it’s stressful, especially in a competitive market or when you’re buying and selling at the same time. So we’re redesigning the homebuying experience. We’re a fast-paced real estate startup that empowers agents to help homebuyers buy with cash. We buy homes on behalf of our partners’ clients with our cash, then the client buys the home back from us.

Founder and CEO Tim Heyl, a 10-year industry veteran and owner of one of the fastest-growing agent teams in the country, started Homeward in 2018. In fact, he bought our first customer’s home with his own life savings. Today we offer two services — Buy with cash and Buy before you sell.

We’ve raised more than $160MM in equity capital from top-tier venture investors, including Norwest, Blackstone Alternative Asset Management, Adams Street, Javelin, and LiveOak. Our leadership team includes experts from the real estate, mortgage, and technology industries.

About The Opportunity

We're seeking a Senior User Researcher to help us build a simpler, more customer-centric home buying and selling experience in partnership with real estate agents.

This role is not eligible to be performed from Colorado. This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship.

In This Role, You Will:

• Report to our VP, Product and work closely with senior leadership to identify key research opportunities to inform and prioritize company initiatives & digital strategy.
• You’ll join a small Product team and have a big impact on the company, developing research plans that affect our service & digital product development. 
• Partner with groups across the entire org from Operations to Marketing to Product & Engineering to develop appropriately rigorous and rapidly executed research opportunities.
• Spend most of your time listening to customer, partner agents, and internal team member feedback via any medium available - from user interviews to surveys to long-term diary studies.  You will pick the right modality and structure for the desired research outcome.
• Summarize and communicate your research insights to the broader organization and leadership team to continually develop a sense of user needs, regular refinement of business processes, and ensure we’re exceeding our customer & agent partners’ expectations. 
• Create, maintain, and socialize important artifacts like monthly summaries, journey maps, and personas to align our organization on dimensions of our service & customers’ experiences.
• Oversee survey implementation across verticals. Collaborate cross-functionally and with Data Analyst to ensure Mode Dashboards are up to date and accomplish our data goals.
• Be exceptionally outcomes-focused to ensure we’re always solving the most important problem. 
• Get up to speed on the residential real-estate industry and become well-versed in the  home buying, home selling, and home valuation processes. 
• Build upon good research practices at Homeward and continue to help us adopt best practices.

What You’ll Bring:

• You have a 6+ years of research experience in a high-performance startup or technology company.
• You’re collaborative and open to feedback. You’re great at working as part of a team and love getting input on your research plans and research roadmap so you can continuously improve. 
• You’re able to ship quickly and adjust your process to fit the needs of an early stage startup. You create high-quality research studies in short cycle times. You value shipping a good solution now over a great solution several weeks from now.
• You’re interested in improving the complex, emotional process of buying and selling a home and making it the exciting milestone in people’s lives that it deserves to be.
• Hands-on experience conducting a variety of research practices such as user interviews, user testing, and user surveying.
• Strong analytical skills and the ability to balance and interpret quantitative and qualitative feedback into synthesized, insightful summaries
• Demonstrable experience developing high-quality research artifacts for a variety of audiences - including things like User Journey Maps and Service Blueprints.
• An educational background in the following or relevant work experience: Psychology, Human Computer Interaction, Cognitive Sciences, Design, or any discipline with a strong emphasis on qualitative and quantitative research methods

Nice To Haves:

• You have experience in the real estate space
• Knowledge of SQL or other querying language and ability to fulfill some of your own basic reporting needs
• Solid understanding of web analytics tools and strong quantitative analysis skills

Our ValuesTHE GOLDEN RULE

Whether we’re dealing with colleagues or customers, we follow The Golden Rule, treating others the way we want to be treated. It’s a simple rule, but it’s also significant: we don’t prioritize money or growth over people, and we practice empathy at every opportunity.

CALM FOCUS

We work in tech and build solutions for real estate. Both are fast-paced and stressful industries. So it’s important that  we focus on the larger objective rather than rushing from one task to the next. If something is out of scope, we say “No.” If something feels rushed, we pump the brakes. This calm focus helps us create solutions our customers love.

ONE TEAM, ONE DREAM

Big problems require big solutions. We look at our customers’ experience holistically, and recognize that solving them requires collaboration across teams. This approach extends to cooperation among our three affiliate companies — Homeward, Homeward Mortgage and Homeward Title — and produces  a more integrated homebuying experience.