Research Manager

Own client research projects end to end: methodology design, fieldwork, analysis, and the presentation at the end of it. This is not account management.

The role

You will own client research projects end to end: methodology design, fieldwork, analysis, and the presentation at the end of it. This is not account management, and it is not a role where you hand a brief to someone else and check in on it. You design the instrument, you solve the recruitment problem, you make sense of a pile of voice notes, and you stand in front of the client and explain what it means.

How the work runs matters as much as the research itself. We want someone who is exceptionally organised, quick to respond, and able to hold several studies on different fieldwork clocks without losing precision on any of them. Clients should feel that we are slightly ahead of them, that we anticipated the question they were about to ask, and that the thing we promised on Thursday arrived on Thursday.

We are also looking for someone who will not treat the current way of doing things as the finished version. Plenty of what we do can be faster, sharper and more automated than it is today, and the person in this seat should be pushing on that constantly rather than waiting to be asked.

We are growing and our research workload is growing with us. This role expands the delivery capacity of the research team so we can take on more work without moving off the standard our clients expect.

What you'll own

Research delivery

• Lead full-service research projects end to end, qualitative and quantitative.
• Consult on approach, scoping and methodology, and shape the study before it becomes a study.
• Design instruments, surveys and discussion guides that work inside a chat thread, and iterate quickly on client feedback.
• Manage participant recruitment across client databases, panel partners, social media and partner networks, and hit quota.
• Run fieldwork on WhatsApp: invites, incentives, quotas and quality checks.
• Analyse quantitative and qualitative data together, including voice note transcripts at volume, and build a clear narrative out of it.
• Produce client-ready deliverables and present the findings yourself, including the harder conversations.

Clients

• Own the relationship on your projects, anticipate what a client needs before they ask for it, and be the person they want on the next brief.
• Run client calls with confidence and expertise, and help people work out what their project should actually be.
• Train clients on our AI interview and survey capabilities, and troubleshoot alongside them.
• Manage timelines, budgets and expectations, and be straight with people early when something moves.
• Turn a first project into a second one through the quality of the work rather than a sales pitch.

Published work

• Turn delivered projects into client case studies with real numbers in them.
• Publish a methodology or findings piece regularly, sourced from work you did, under your own name.
• Contribute to our quarterly public research report.
• Become an expert in the method and an advocate for it. We are not changing how research is designed, we are changing the platform it runs on, and you should be able to show a client exactly where a WhatsApp approach outperforms email and SMS, and where it does not.

Raising the bar

• Improve the systems behind delivery: templates, quality checks, reporting formats, anything that makes the next project faster and better than the last one.
• Feed what you learn from live projects back to our product and engineering team. You will use the platform every day, which makes you one of the best-placed people in the company to say precisely what is missing and why it matters.
• Keep an eye on the wider market: what other platforms do well, what clients are starting to ask for, and where we should move first.

AI is part of the job.

We treat AI as a working partner rather than an occasional productivity tool. You should already be using it, and you should be the kind of person who keeps asking how it could take another hour out of the week.

• Use AI across instrument design, analysis at volume, transcript work and reporting.
• Automate the repetitive parts of delivery so more of your time goes into thinking.
• Try new tools, and build the ones that earn their place into how the team works.

What we're looking for

• 4 to 7 years in a research agency, consultancy or client-side insights team, delivering client projects end to end. Agency experience across a range of clients is a real advantage.
• A qualitative foundation with genuine competence in quantitative work. We need both, and the centre of gravity of this method is the voice note.
• Strong instrument design: question order, routing, scale choice, screener logic, and the judgement to know what to cut.
• Strong reporting and storytelling. You can write a clear paragraph that a stranger would read to the end, and you know how to show a client what the insight is rather than handing over a chart pack. We will ask you to show us.
• Client-facing excellence: clear communication, expectation management, and the ability to handle a difficult conversation well.
• Highly organised and reliable, genuinely good at prioritising, and comfortable running several studies at once without dropping any of them.
• A high affinity for AI-led ways of working, familiarity with AI-assisted research tools, and an appetite to keep extending both.
• Full ownership. The studies you run are yours from first brief to final presentation, and you are comfortable carrying that with light supervision.
• Ambition. You want to be better at this in a year than you are now, and you are drawn to raising a standard rather than meeting one.

Nice to have

• Experience across several research platforms and tools, and a good instinct for what makes software pleasant or painful to use. You will have real influence over ours.
• WhatsApp or mobile-first research, or emerging market fieldwork.
• Experience optimising incentives, response rates and sample quality across diverse audiences.
• Data visualisation skills and basic design taste.
• Familiarity with SaaS, product feedback research or CX measurement.

How you'll work

Hybrid, based in Cape Town, with real flexibility.

Short feedback loops and decisions made quickly. Something one of the team built in a day shipped as a live feature a week later.

Strategic thinking paired with hands-on delivery and genuine ownership. No task too small.

Close collaboration with our Head of Insights on anything published, and with our product team on what live projects reveal about the platform.

You report to our Head of Research.

What success looks like

• Consistent on-time delivery of high-quality projects with clear, actionable insight.
• Clients who renew, expand and refer, and who ask for you by name on the next project.
• Two or more published case studies generated from your own work.
• Measurable improvement in response rates, turnaround time or operational efficiency, through better systems and AI-assisted workflows.
• Independent ownership of your project portfolio.

What we offer

• R48,000 to R62,000 p/m, cost to company, depending on experience.
• A meaningful equity stake, with a one-year cliff and four-year vesting.
• Budget for tools, learning and professional development.
• Work with genuinely new AI research technology.
• Visibility and recognition. In a team this size the work you deliver is seen immediately, by everyone, including the people deciding what happens next.
• Three months probation, with reviews at three months and then every six.

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