Reports To: CEO or designated executive leader
Primary Partners: Revenue, Data, Activation, Product, and Executive Leadership
Core Mandate: Lead and evolve the Insights practice from a primarily polling-centered function into a broader, commercially relevant research and insights capability.
Role Level: Director-level practice leader with strong methodological fluency, commercial judgment, team leadership, and strategic storytelling capability.
Role Overview
The Director of Insights leads Statara's Insights practice, serving as the senior functional leader for research strategy, methodological rigor, analytical interpretation, and insight-driven storytelling.
Historically, Statara's Insights function has been rooted in political polling, including survey research, focus groups, questionnaire design, sampling, weighting, topline analysis, crosstab interpretation, and public opinion research. That foundation remains essential. At the same time, this role is responsible for helping evolve the function into a broader, commercially relevant insights practice that supports market research, audience understanding, account planning, product research, segmentation, modeling, message strategy, narrative development, and client growth.
This is not simply a research execution role. The Director is responsible for building the standards, frameworks, team capabilities, and cross-functional ways of working that allow insights to shape strategy across the business. Research outputs should do more than report data; they should translate findings into implications, recommendations, narratives, and commercial opportunities.
The Director partners closely with Pods, Revenue, Data, Activation, Product, and executive leadership to ensure insights are integrated into client strategy, proposals, reporting, product development, and long-term growth. The ideal candidate brings deep research fluency, strong analytical judgment, commercial curiosity, and the ability to turn complex data into clear, compelling stories that drive action.
Primary Mandate
- Lead the continued evolution of Statara's Insights practice from a predominantly political polling function into a broader strategic insights capability.
- Preserve and strengthen Statara's credibility in polling, survey research, and methodological rigor while expanding into commercial, market, product, audience, and strategic insights work.
- Build scalable standards, frameworks, operating rhythms, and deliverable models that raise the quality, consistency, and strategic value of insights across the organization.
- Ensure insights work contributes directly to stronger client strategy, better proposals, clearer narratives, product evolution, revenue growth, renewals, and expansion opportunities.
Key Responsibilities
1. Insights Practice Leadership
- Lead and evolve Statara's Insights practice, ensuring the function delivers rigorous, strategically valuable, and commercially relevant research across political, commercial, product, audience, and market contexts.
- Develop the frameworks, standards, operating rhythms, and deliverable models that allow the Insights function to scale beyond project-by-project execution.
- Define how insights should support client strategy, account growth, product development, audience understanding, message strategy, and narrative development across the organization.
- Partner with leadership to identify opportunities to expand Statara's insights capabilities, offerings, and commercial relevance.
- Serve as the internal champion for moving insights from tactical research outputs to strategic business value.
2. Research Strategy, Methodology, and Quality Standards
- Set and maintain high standards for research design, survey methodology, qualitative research, sampling, weighting, modeling, segmentation, data interpretation, reporting, and presentation development.
- Ensure research outputs are methodologically sound, clearly documented, appropriately interpreted, and tailored to the strategic question being asked.
- Establish reusable frameworks that help teams move from findings to implications, recommendations, and action.
- Advise internal teams on the right research approach for a given business, client, product, or strategic question.
- Strengthen quality-control processes so data, analysis, and interpretation are consistently defensible and credible.
3. Commercial, Market, and Product Insights Expansion
- Expand the Insights function beyond traditional political polling into broader market research, commercial insights, product research, customer and audience understanding, account planning, and strategic narrative development.
- Develop insights offerings, frameworks, and deliverables that increase Statara's relevance to commercial clients and non-political use cases.
- Support Revenue and client-facing teams with research-backed perspectives that strengthen proposals, pitches, account strategies, renewals, expansions, and client recommendations.
- Partner with Product and Data teams to identify opportunities for new insights products, research tools, reporting formats, and scalable offerings.
- Translate research capabilities into commercially useful services that help Statara solve a wider range of client problems.
4. Polling Excellence and Methodological Rigor
- Preserve and strengthen Statara's polling expertise, including public opinion research, benchmark surveys, tracking polls, message testing, issue research, audience studies, focus groups, and other survey-based work.
- Set standards for questionnaire design, sample composition, fielding methodology, weighting, margin-of-error communication, topline reporting, crosstab interpretation, and polling-based storytelling.
- Ensure polling results are interpreted responsibly, including appropriate treatment of subgroup findings, trend movement, statistical significance, and research limitations.
- Provide hands-on guidance or direct support for complex, high-profile, or strategically important research efforts when needed.
- Help internal teams understand when polling is the right research tool, when another methodology may be more appropriate, and how polling findings should be used alongside other data sources.
5. Client Strategy, Storytelling, and Pod Partnership
- Partner with Pods and client-facing teams early in the strategy process to shape research questions, interpret findings, identify strategic implications, and build compelling client narratives.
- Ensure deliverables connect data, findings, implications, recommendations, and next steps in a way that is clear, credible, and actionable.
- Serve as a senior internal advisor on audience understanding, message strategy, targeting, segmentation, campaign strategy, product positioning, and activation opportunities.
- Participate in senior client conversations when insights expertise is needed to clarify findings, guide strategy, or strengthen recommendations.
- Raise the quality of insights storytelling across the organization by helping teams translate complex research into sharp, client-ready narratives.
6. Team Leadership and Capability Building
- Lead, manage, and develop the Insights team, building capability in research design, polling, analytics, qualitative methods, market research, modeling, storytelling, and client advisory work.
- Set clear expectations for quality, timeliness, collaboration, documentation, methodological rigor, and strategic thinking.
- Coach team members to move beyond reporting data toward interpreting meaning, identifying implications, and shaping recommendations.
- Support hiring, onboarding, talent development, performance management, and resource planning for the Insights function.
- Create a culture of curiosity, rigor, accountability, commercial awareness, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
Success Looks Like
- The Insights function is viewed internally as a strategic practice, not only as a polling or research execution team.
- Statara preserves its credibility in polling while expanding into broader commercial, market, product, audience, and strategic insights work.
- Pods and client-facing teams involve Insights earlier in the strategy process because the function helps shape better questions, stronger narratives, and clearer recommendations.
- Research deliverables consistently connect data to meaning, implications, and action.
- Insights contribute directly to stronger client strategy, better proposals, renewals, expansions, and new commercial opportunities.
- Research standards, templates, methodologies, and quality-control processes are documented, scalable, and consistently used.
- The Insights team grows in capability, confidence, strategic judgment, and storytelling strength.
Requirements
Ideal Background and Experience
The ideal candidate brings a combination of research expertise, polling experience, analytical judgment, commercial curiosity, strategic storytelling, and people leadership. They should be comfortable leading a team and building a practice while also engaging directly in complex research and insights work when needed.
- Significant experience leading research, insights, analytics, polling, market research, strategy, or data-driven consulting functions.
- Strong hands-on experience with traditional polling, including public opinion research, benchmark surveys, tracking polls, message testing, issue research, questionnaire development, sample design, weighting, topline analysis, and crosstab interpretation.
- Experience expanding research or insights capabilities beyond a legacy or core offering into broader market, audience, product, commercial, or strategic applications.
- Comfort and credibility operating within the polling and public opinion research community, including peers, vendors, and methodological practitioners across the industry.
- Strong understanding of survey research, qualitative methods (including focus group design, moderation, and analysis), sampling, data processing, segmentation, modeling, reporting, and presentation development.
- Demonstrated ability to translate complex data and research findings into clear strategic recommendations and compelling narratives.
- Experience building client-facing presentations, reports, proposals, account-planning materials, or strategic deliverables.
- Ability to partner effectively with commercial, technical, analytical, product, and client-facing teams.
- Experience managing and developing research, analytics, polling, or insights professionals.
- Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain methodology, findings, implications, and recommendations to technical and non-technical audiences.
Leadership Attributes
- Practice builder: Creates scalable approaches, not just one-off project outputs.
- Strategic translator: Turns data and research into decisions, narratives, and action.
- Commercially curious: Understands how insights can support growth, retention, product development, and client value.
- Methodologically rigorous: Protects quality, credibility, and responsible interpretation.
- Collaborative influencer: Works across functions and earns trust with senior internal and client stakeholders.
- Player-coach: Leads the team while retaining enough technical fluency to guide complex work.
Benefits
We believe that a diverse, inclusive staff is a fundamental strength. We’re committed to hiring people of all races, ethnicities, religions, ages, sex, genders, sexual orientations, and gender identities. Women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and members of untapped groups are strongly encouraged to apply and are welcome on our teams.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process and employment. If you require an accommodation to apply for or interview for this position, please let us know.
We encourage candidates to apply even if their experience does not align perfectly with every qualification listed.
COMPETITIVE COMPENSATION
Including a 401(k) with generous company matching.
100% REMOTE WORKING OPPORTUNITY
Always have been and always will be.
TOP-NOTCH MEDICAL COVERAGE
Domestic-partner inclusive, health, dental, vision, life, cancer coverage, and long-term disability insurance for you and your dependents.
GENEROUS PAID TIME OFF
23 days of PTO per year. We believe in work-life balance and encourage you to use your time off.
PAID PARENTAL LEAVE
10 weeks of fully paid time off. All genders qualify equally, and the policy includes adoptions.
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