User Research (Discovery) Specialist

About the role

The Product Experience Design team helps shape and accelerate the future of BT’s innovation portfolio. Working across emerging opportunities in areas such as Physical AI, Connected Solutions, Defence, Healthcare, Transport and Digital Services, we help teams move from uncertainty to evidence-based decision making.

As a User Research (Discovery) Specialist, you will bring deep expertise in customer research and discovery methods while operating beyond traditional research boundaries. You will use research as a tool to help teams understand opportunities, align stakeholders, reduce uncertainty and make better product and investment decisions.

You will be responsible for driving complex discovery programmes across some of BT’s most strategic and ambiguous initiatives. Working closely with Product Managers, Engineers, and Designers, you will uncover customer needs, validate assumptions, identify opportunity areas and help teams understand where BT can create meaningful value.

This is not a traditional research role focused solely on generating insight. We are looking for someone who can combine research, facilitation, strategic thinking and storytelling to bring clarity to uncertainty. You will help teams understand which opportunities are worth pursuing, what risks need to be reduced, and what evidence is required to make confident decisions.

What makes this role different:

• Drive discovery across emerging products, services and innovation initiatives.
• Operate at the earliest stages of opportunity development where problems are often poorly defined.
• Influence strategic decisions through evidence, facilitation and stakeholder alignment.
• Help embed user-centred and evidence-based thinking across BT's innovation portfolio.
• Work across a diverse range of domains including AI, connectivity, drones, digital platforms and future services.

What you’ll be doing

You are accountable for helping teams make better strategic decisions through customer understanding, evidence generation and structured discovery.

Drive Discovery Programmes - Plan and deliver end-to-end discovery activities across multiple innovation initiatives, identifying key assumptions, risks and learning objectives required to move opportunities forward.

Transform Ambiguity into Actionable Direction - Help teams move from loosely defined ideas to clearly articulated opportunity spaces, customer problems, hypotheses and recommended next steps.

Generate Decision-Enabling Evidence - Design and execute appropriate qualitative and quantitative research activities including interviews, contextual research, workshops, surveys, concept testing and experimentation.

Facilitate Alignment Across Stakeholders - Facilitate workshops and cross-functional activities that bring together Product, Engineering, Commercial, Delivery and Leadership stakeholders to create shared understanding, prioritisation and momentum.

Shape Opportunity and Product Strategy - Work with product teams to identify customer needs, market opportunities and business challenges, translating research outcomes into clear recommendations and strategic options.

Communicate Insights with Impact - Create compelling narratives, artefacts and presentations that help stakeholders understand customer needs, make difficult choices and gain confidence in proposed directions.

Champion Human-Centred Innovation - Advocate for evidence-based and customer-centred practices, helping teams embed discovery, experimentation and learning into their ways of working.

Contribute to Team Capability Growth - Support colleagues across Product Experience Design by sharing knowledge, mentoring others and helping evolve discovery practices, methods and standards.

Essential Skills / Experience

• Discovery and user research leadership – Significant experience leading discovery and user research programmes that have identified validated customer needs, tested key assumptions and influenced the progression, redesign or stopping of products and services.
• Navigating ambiguity – Proven ability to turn complex, early-stage problem spaces into clearly defined customer problems, prioritised opportunities, testable hypotheses and structured next steps.
• Stakeholder facilitation and influence – Proven experience facilitating cross-functional workshops and communicating compelling research narratives that create stakeholder alignment, resolve competing priorities and influence senior-level product or investment decisions.

Desirable Skills / Experience

• Experience within innovation, incubation, venture building or emerging technology environments.
• Exposure to service design, systems thinking or journey-based problem-framing approaches.
• Experience working with AI-enabled products, connected devices, IoT, telecommunications or digital platforms.
• Knowledge of quantitative research, experimentation and evidence-led product development practices.
• Experience coaching or mentoring researchers, designers or product teams.
• Familiarity with tools such as UserTesting, Askable, Attest, Mural and Figma.

Experience in a start-up, scale-up, or incubator working culture

Our Package

Tailored benefits make a real difference. That’s why we offer a comprehensive range to support your growth, wellbeing, and everyday life. You can design the package to suit you and your lifestyle. Your core benefits include:

• 10% on target annual bonus
• Access to an online private GP 24/7 for you and your immediate family
• Market-leading paid carers leave with up to 2 weeks off
• Equalised maternity, paternity, and adoption leave – 18 weeks’ full pay and 8 weeks’ half pay
• Discounted EE and BT products, including mobile and broadband
• Market leading Pension scheme – 5% from you and 10% from us
• Holiday purchase scheme

You can select additional benefits, including healthcare, dental, gym memberships and more when you’re ready.

BT Group is the UK’s leading communications group and the holding company behind some of the country’s most recognised brands – including BT, EE, Openreach and Plusnet. Our purpose is as simple as it is ambitious: we connect for good. Our customers include consumers, small, medium and large businesses, public sector organisations and other communications providers.

BT Group’s role is about setting direction, unlocking value and creating the conditions for our brands and businesses to thrive.

Having come through the most capital-intensive phase of our fibre investment, our focus now is on what comes next – simplifying how we operate, using technology and AI to work smarter, and organising ourselves to serve customers better and grow sustainably. Group teams shape strategy, policy, brand, capital allocation and transformation, helping the whole organisation perform at its best.

We have a singular culture that unites all our people: we are customer-first challengers, who are committed, clear and connected. These behaviours unite us as one team to deliver for our colleagues, our customers, our stakeholders and the country. Joining BT Group means working at the heart of a business that matters to the UK, with the opportunity to shape decisions, influence outcomes and help set the future course of one of the country’s most important companies.