Senior Research Operations Coordinator

Research Operations role across multiple teams

Location: Flexible - commutable distance to London or Bristol

OVO exists to power human progress with clean and affordable energy for everyone.

Our user experience community is growing and we’re seeking a well-organised senior research operations coordinator to help our product teams get ever closer to their users.

You’ll be working within Kaluza, which is shaping the future: a distributed, consumer-centric energy system providing clean, affordable energy for everyone. Orion is our flexible software platform, which enables energy suppliers to provide a simple, transparent, reliable experience to their customers. Flex is our intelligent software that connects a range of devices and uses machine learning to optimise energy usage when costs and carbon levels are lower. We build tools and processes which enable suppliers to solve customer problems and help end users better manage their energy at home.

User research helps us make better decisions about what we should build, and how we should build it — you’ll help us conduct research more efficiently, reach a diverse set of participants and curate insights, so we deliver services which work for everyone. You’ll be responsible for enabling great research to happen and ensuring people taking part in our research have the best possible participant experience.

We’ve created the foundations of our research infrastructure, including communication templates, incentives, and method protocols. As we mature our research capability to meet our ambitious Plan Zero goals, we need to conduct more research, at a larger scale.

You’ll support researchers and designers to focus on collecting data and making sense of it; by understanding how research happens to shape a strategy for a systematised, self-service, framework that democratises our practice. So that our products teams are learning the right things about our users, at the right time. 

You’ll work in Bristol or London, and collaborate with people across the UK. Though right now we’re all working remotely due to Coronavirus. Learn more about working in the OVO family of companies at ovoenergy.com/careers and Glassdoor. We were delighted to win a 2018 Top Employers award and uSwitch's 2019 Supplier of the Year.

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Diverse teams are the best teams. Only when we represent everyone, can we create services for everyone. We’re keen to meet people with varied backgrounds: the more inclusive we are the better our work will be. We understand some people may not apply to jobs unless they tick every box. And we know 'normal' office hours don't work for everyone, so we're open to discussing flexible working requests. If you're excited about joining us and think you have much of what we're looking for, even if you're not 100% sure… we'd love to hear from you.

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Your objectives

• define a strategy, and approach, for systematising the process for doing research
• design and build services which help our researchers and designers conduct user
  research quickly, easily, and cost-effectively
• ensure our research logistics are smooth, timely, and optimised
• scale our research processes and tools to enable ever more impactful research to be delivered
• organise knowledge and insights in a way that all our teams can benefit from them

Whether you’re on a call helping a participant to take part in research, or archiving usability testing data… you’ll have to go beyond problem solving: we’re after a problem finder.

What you’ll be doing

First three months

• immerse yourself in the energy industry and our market landscape – be curious!
• meet your new colleagues and stakeholders, and understand how research happens
• understand our platform, the users within our ecosystem and each team’s research needs
• audit our current systems and processes to identify what needs improving
• connect with, and get to know, our wider research and design community

Within six months

• enhance our processes for recruiting participants and ensure that their data is secure
• showcase the operations we have in place, encourage people to use them
• set out a roadmap to show how we can mature our processes and tools 
• bring in learnings from the research operations community, and shareback  

You’ll love working with us if you...

• have a passion for understanding real people’s real problems
• have a critical thinking process and enjoy studying problems to puzzle out the challenges
• recognise assumptions (including your own) and seek ways to try and invalidate them
• are empathetic with colleagues as well as customers, especially when you’re communicating  research findings, explaining the rationale behind a design, or challenging ways of working
• know your strengths, and recognise there’s always more to learn from others
• embrace agile and iteration, and celebrate learning and change

You’ll join our OVO-wide community of researchers and designers. UX at OVO means helping teams see their product through the eyes of real people—understanding their context, motivations, and needs—so we can improve things for everyone.

We use whatever methods and media best suit the challenge, and inform strategic choices about where improvements could have the greatest impact. We love design workshops, getting people excited about service design, UX critiques, improving our accessibility, and putting participants first in our research. We fall in love with the problem, not our solutions.

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OVO exists to power human progress with clean and affordable  energy for all. We’re here to challenge the status quo: to do what’s right, find a better way, and build something great. We embrace simplicity, transparency, and treating people and our planet fairly. We understand that attracting and keeping the best talent is key to our forward-thinking future, so our people will always share in our success. Our benefits are nice too. 

We want to build teams which represent a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills, and we hire on the basis of merit and potential. So get in touch, ask lots of questions.