Director of Insights

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…