Design Researcher

Job Description:

About TTI

TTI is a world-class leader in design, manufacturing and marketing of power tools and accessories, outdoor product equipment and floor care for consumers, professional and industrial users in the home improvement, repair and construction industries. Our unrelenting strategic focus on powerful brands, innovative products, operational excellence and exceptional people drives our culture. This focus and drive provides TTI with a powerful platform for sustainable leadership and strong growth.

Our brands and products are recognized worldwide for their deep heritage, superior quality, outstanding performance and compelling innovation. Our products include professional power tools and accessories, outdoor power equipment and floor care. Our brands include Milwaukee®, AEG®, Ryobi®, Homelite®, Oreck®, Hoover®, Dirt Devil® and Vax®.

About the Advanced Concepts Team

Advanced Concepts is an early innovation R&D group comprised of researchers, engineers, and designers within the Consumer Power Tools for the RYOBI and RIDGID brands. We work with teams throughout the company including engineering, industrial design, analytical, and product management to deliver both exploratory and evaluative user research findings that drive concept development and prototype evaluation. We are a very hands-on group that thrives on learning throughout our diverse projects and apply our skillsets to create new and innovative products that meet our users' needs.

Job Summary

We are looking for a Design Researcher to join our Advanced Concepts team at TTI within the Consumer Power Tools Group, supporting the RYOBI and RIDGID brands in Anderson, South Carolina. The Design Researcher will join the Advanced Concepts team to explore our users' needs, pain points, and contexts delivering actionable insights to the Product Development team. The primary research methodology of this Design Research role is in-field qualitative research, with supplemental quantitative and online research.

This role will be onsite at our Anderson, SC location.

Responsibilities

• Lead scoping and discovery research to understand consumer needs, behaviors, and pain points, including in-home and in-field ethnography, in-depth interviews, and contextual inquiry in the real environments where people live and work
• Synthesize research into clear, compelling insights and bring them to life through storytelling and sessions that build genuine consumer empathy across engineering, design, and product teams
• Partner with concept teams to translate insights into opportunity spaces, facilitating work sessions that move from what consumers need to what we could build
• Evaluate and downselect concepts from the consumer lens, helping the team focus on ideas that solve real problems
• Take concepts into field with real users to evaluate early prototypes, iterate based on honest feedback, and validate that the solution actually works
• Synthesize and document learnings at the end of each project and hand off insights to engineering and product development teams to inform what gets built
• Contribute to building a network of engaged consumers who can participate in ongoing research, co-creation, and feedback sessions over time

Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Consumer Insights, Communications, Psychology, Sociology, Industrial Design, or a related field. What matters is how you think about people and how you tell their story, not your major.

Master's degree welcome but not required.

• Qualitative research skills: in-home / in-field ethnography, in-depth interviews (IDIs), contextual inquiry, and prototype evaluation
• Analytical: comfort analyzing qualitative and quantitative data and finding the insight that matters
• Category thinking: understands consumer behavior and can identify unmet needs, gaps, and opportunity spaces
• Synthesis: turns complex, messy findings into clear and actionable direction
• Ability to translate consumer needs into language engineers and product teams can act on
• Strong work ethic
• Ability to work within a multi-disciplinary team effectively
• Disposition to thrive in a fast-paced environment with responsibility for multiple projects at once
• 25-35% overnight domestic travel

Mid-Level: 3-5 years of experience with demonstrated involvement in front-end innovation, consumer insights, or new product development

We Value

• Researchers who are genuinely curious about why consumers behave the way they do
• Innovation mindset: comfortable with ambiguity and able to connect insights to opportunity spaces
• Maker mindset: excited to jump into a new project and not afraid to get their hands dirty
• Comfort in field environments: people's homes, garages, and job sites
• Experience with durable goods, physical products, or hands-on consumer categories is a plus
• Collaborative contributors who bring outside experience and interests to brainstorms
• Cross-functional communicators who can bridge consumer insights and engineering teams

Benefits

We offer competitive wages and a comprehensive benefits package: tuition assistance, 401(k), medical/dental/vision coverage, vacation and holidays.