Manager/Senior Manager: Consumer Insights (AI-First)
About Urban Company
Urban Company is a technology platform offering customers a variety of services at home. Customers use our platform to book services such as beauty treatments, haircuts, massage therapy, cleaning, plumbing, carpentry, appliance repair, painting etc., all delivered in the comfort of their home and at a time of their choosing. We promise our customers a high-quality, standardized and reliable service experience. To fulfill this promise, we work closely with our hand-picked service partners, enabling them with technology, training, products, tools, financing, insurance, and brand, helping them succeed and deliver on this promise.
Urban Company started out as UrbanClap in Nov 2014, when its founders, Abhiraj, Raghav and Varun realized that the home services industry was predominantly unorganized, fragmented and offline. Customers found it difficult to avail quality services in a convenient manner, and service professionals were struggling to make ends meet, having to rely upon several middlemen, contractors, and local aggregators. The founders felt that the industry was ripe for disruption, and launched Urban Company, with three key principles in mind -
- Customer love: Build a platform that offers truly delightful and differentiated services
- Partner empowerment: Build a deep, full-stack partnership with service partners, helping improve their earnings and overall livelihood
- Technology first: Bring innovation and technology to an age-old industry.
About the Role
Urban Company is at the scale where every category decision - a pricing change, a new SKU or a change to the consumer journey moves meaningful NTV. Sharp research is our muscle that sets those decisions up for success. And the industry itself is being rewritten: consumer studies that took weeks now take days with AI moderators and synthesis; pricing studies that needed 400 CATI interviews can be run end-to-end with AI calling.
We are looking for a Manager/Senior Manager - Research who can do two things at once. One, run the research engine across category research as an independent operator. Two, reimagine how that engine works in an AI-first world - building the tooling, ops automation and operating model that lets a lean research function punch far above its weight.
This is a solo IC role today. There is no layer between you and agencies or the category & business leaders. You will own and scale the practice.
What you'll own
- Consumer research: Usage & attitude studies, customer journey mapping, agile qual + quant studies that inform real-time service, ops and category decisions across UC's range of services & produts (InstaHelp, Native, Beauty, Cleaning, AC, Revamp and more).
- Brand & funnel research: Brand health tracking, funnel drop-off insights. The go-to research partner for brand and marketing.
- Category & market research: Market/occasion sizing, competitive intelligence, pricing studies, new SKU/category validation. The person category leaders pull in when they need an evidence base for a bet.
- UC's AI-first research practice: Build the infrastructure, tooling and ways of working that let UC operate research at 5x the speed and scale of an industry-standard setup. Concretely:
- AI-led primary research: qual + quant consumer insights via AI moderation (already in practice), pricing studies via AI calling + synthesis.
- Research ops automation: auto-generated discussion guides from study objectives, automated data cleaning and quality flags, sample size recommendations driven by hypothesis/objectives/answers needed.
- Internal AI tooling: Custom GPTs / agentic workflows that synthesize multiple data inputs (e.g. consumer support tickets, NPS data, app/playstore reviews) to put structured research self-service in the hands of category and brand teams.
How you'll operate
You will own the agency ecosystem end-to-end: scoping, briefing, costing, QA, insights to final business recommendations. You will sit close to marketing & business leaders, translate fuzzy questions into sharp research questions, and come back with actionable, evidence-based business recommendations, not just findings or insights.
What we're looking for
Must-haves
- Experience: 4-8 years of research experience (consumer / brand / market) at a research agency, strategy consultancy, or in-house at a consumer or internet company. Level (Manager vs Sr Manager) will be calibrated to the candidate.
- Foundational craft: strong in qual and quant methodologies, sample design, questionnaire design, statistical literacy. You know a leading question or a biased sample from a mile away.
- Demonstrably independent: Have run multi-stakeholder research programs end-to-end with minimal oversight: owned the agency relationship, not just attended the presentation.
- Comfortable presenting to senior business stakeholders and pushing back when the data says one thing and institutional intuition says another.
- Genuine, hands-on enthusiasm for AI in research: Have built with AI tools vs. having read about them/used AI in an ad-hoc fashion. You bring a point of view on where AI replaces, augments, or fails in research.
- Owner's mindset: Comfortable shipping/iterating in the open & collaborating with teams.
Good to have
- Experience in a consumer internet, services or D2C business.
- Familiarity with the India research partner landscape (quant + qual) and the ability to manage the entire relationship end to end.
Why take this role
- Greenfield AI-first mandate: Most research jobs in India are still wired around 2018 ways of working. This one explicitly isn't.
- High autonomy & ownership: You'll have ownership & visibility that typically comes two levels up.
- Scale & breadth of problem statements: UC runs millions of services a year across India and international markets. The decisions your research informs are consequential.
At Urban Company, we are committed to providing equal and fair opportunities in employment and creating an inclusive work environment. We endeavor to maintain a work environment free from harassment based on age, colour, physical ability, marital status, parental status, ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
