Director of Insights

Role summary

The Director of Insights is the senior leader responsible for shaping Statara Solutions’ research and insights function. Reporting to the CEO or another designated executive leader, this role works closely with Revenue, Data, Activation, Product, and executive leadership to grow the practice from a polling-focused capability into a broader, commercially useful insights discipline.

This position requires a blend of deep methodological knowledge, strong commercial judgment, team leadership, and the ability to translate complex evidence into clear strategy. The successful candidate will help set the standards, frameworks, and operating model that let insights influence client strategy, product thinking, proposals, narratives, and business growth.

Core focus

The practice has historically centered on political polling, survey research, focus groups, questionnaire creation, sampling, weighting, topline reporting, crosstab analysis, and public opinion research. Those strengths remain important, but the role is designed to broaden the function into market research, audience understanding, product research, segmentation, message strategy, account planning, modeling, and commercial storytelling.

This is not only an execution role. The director is expected to build durable standards and reusable approaches so the Insights team can consistently produce work that goes beyond reporting data and instead delivers implications, recommendations, narratives, and actionable opportunities.

Primary mandate

• Guide the transition of the Insights practice from a mainly political polling function into a wider strategic insights capability.
• Protect and strengthen the firm’s reputation for polling accuracy, survey rigor, and sound methodology while extending the team into commercial and market-facing work.
• Create scalable standards, templates, rhythms, and delivery models that improve consistency and strategic value across projects.
• Make sure insights directly support client strategy, stronger proposals, clearer narratives, product evolution, revenue growth, renewals, and expansion opportunities.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the Insights function so it delivers rigorous, strategically useful, and commercially relevant research across political, commercial, product, audience, and market settings.
• Define and implement frameworks, standards, and operating rhythms that allow the team to scale beyond one-off project delivery.
• Determine how research should support client strategy, account growth, product development, audience understanding, message strategy, and narrative development.
• Work with leadership to identify new opportunities to expand the practice’s offerings and commercial relevance.
• Act as an internal advocate for elevating insights from tactical research output to strategic business value.
• Set and uphold high standards for research design, survey methodology, qualitative research, sampling, weighting, modeling, segmentation, interpretation, reporting, and presentation development.
• Ensure outputs are methodologically defensible, clearly documented, properly interpreted, and aligned to the strategic question.
• Create reusable structures that help teams move from findings to implications, recommendations, and action.
• Advise internal stakeholders on the best research approach for different business, client, product, or strategic questions.
• Improve quality-control practices so analysis and interpretation remain credible and consistent.
• Expand the practice beyond traditional political polling into market research, customer and audience understanding, commercial insights, product research, account planning, and strategic narrative development.
• Develop new offerings and deliverables that make the Insights function more valuable for commercial clients and non-political use cases.
• Support Revenue and client-facing teams with research-based input that strengthens pitches, proposals, renewals, expansion efforts, and recommendations.
• Partner with Product and Data teams to uncover opportunities for new insights products, reporting formats, research tools, and scalable services.
• Translate research capabilities into practical commercial services that solve a broader range of client needs.
• Maintain and deepen expertise in polling, including public opinion research, benchmark surveys, tracking polls, message testing, issue research, audience studies, focus groups, and survey-based work.
• Set expectations for questionnaire design, sample structure, fielding approach, weighting, margin-of-error communication, topline reporting, crosstab interpretation, and polling storytelling.
• Interpret polling results responsibly, including subgroup analysis, trend movement, statistical significance, and study limitations.
• Provide direct support on complex, visible, or strategically important research projects when needed.
• Help internal teams decide when polling is the right method, when another approach is better, and how polling should be combined with other data sources.
• Work with Pods and client-facing teams early in the strategy process to shape research questions, analyze findings, identify implications, and build strong client narratives.
• Ensure deliverables clearly connect data, findings, implications, recommendations, and next steps.
• Act as a senior advisor on audience understanding, message strategy, targeting, segmentation, campaign strategy, product positioning, and activation opportunities.
• Join senior client discussions when research expertise is needed to explain results, guide strategy, or strengthen recommendations.
• Raise the quality of storytelling across the organization by helping teams turn complex research into sharp, client-ready narratives.
• Lead, manage, and develop the Insights team across research design, polling, analytics, qualitative methods, market research, modeling, storytelling, and advisory work.
• Set expectations around quality, timeliness, collaboration, documentation, methodological rigor, and strategic thinking.
• Coach team members to move past data reporting and into interpretation, implication-setting, and recommendation development.
• Support hiring, onboarding, talent development, performance management, and resource planning for the function.
• Build a culture of curiosity, rigor, accountability, commercial awareness, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

Success looks like

• The Insights team is recognized internally as a strategic practice rather than only a research or polling support team.
• The company maintains credibility in polling while expanding into broader commercial, market, product, audience, and strategic insights work.
• Pods and client-facing teams involve Insights earlier because the function helps shape better questions, stronger narratives, and clearer recommendations.
• Research outputs regularly connect data to meaning, implications, and action.
• Insights contribute directly to stronger strategy, better proposals, renewals, expansions, and new business opportunities.
• Research standards, templates, methods, and quality controls are documented, scalable, and used consistently.
• The team grows in confidence, capability, strategic judgment, and storytelling strength.

Requirements

The ideal candidate combines 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 stepping into complex research work when needed.

• Substantial experience leading research, insights, analytics, polling, market research, strategy, or data-driven consulting teams or functions.
• Hands-on background in 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 growing research or insights capabilities beyond a legacy core offering into broader market, audience, product, commercial, or strategic use cases.
• Comfort and credibility within the polling and public opinion research community, including working with peers, vendors, and methodological practitioners.
• Strong understanding of survey research, qualitative methods such as focus group design, moderation, and analysis, as well as sampling, data processing, segmentation, modeling, reporting, and presentation development.
• Proven ability to turn complex data and research findings into clear strategic guidance and compelling narratives.
• Experience creating client-facing presentations, reports, proposals, account-planning materials, or strategic deliverables.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with commercial, technical, analytical, product, and client-facing partners.
• Experience managing and developing research, analytics, polling, or insights professionals.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain methodology, findings, implications, and recommendations to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Leadership attributes

• Practice builder: develops scalable systems rather than isolated project outputs.
• Strategic translator: turns research into decisions, narratives, and action.
• Commercially curious: understands how insights support growth, retention, product development, and client value.
• Methodologically rigorous: protects quality, credibility, and responsible interpretation.
• Collaborative influencer: earns trust across functions and with senior stakeholders.
• Player-coach: leads the team while staying technically fluent enough to guide complex work.

Benefits and additional information

Statara Solutions emphasizes inclusive hiring and welcomes applicants from all races, ethnicities, religions, ages, sexes, genders, sexual orientations, and gender identities. Women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and members of underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply.

The company also states that reasonable accommodations are available throughout the hiring process and employment. Candidates who need an accommodation to apply or interview are invited to request one.

Applicants are encouraged to apply even if their background does not align perfectly with every qualification listed.

• Competitive compensation.
• 401(k) plan with generous company matching.
• 100% remote working opportunity; the company says this has always been and will continue to be remote.
• Comprehensive medical coverage, including domestic-partner inclusive health, dental, vision, life, cancer, and long-term disability insurance for employees and dependents.
• 23 days of paid time off per year.
• 10 weeks of fully paid parental leave, available equally to all genders and including adoption.

Work setup

This is a full-time remote role based in the United States.