SVP, Research & Insights - Experience & Design Org

SVP, Research & Insights - Experience & Design Org

The next Salesforce will be shaped by how well people and agents can understand one another, share context, delegate authority, recover from failure, and accomplish meaningful outcomes together. These behaviors unfold across roles, products, implementations, data, policies, channels, and time. They cannot be understood through episodic studies or a single adoption metric.

The SVP, Research + Insights will lead Research across Salesforce Experience Design and build a continuous intelligence capability spanning Customer 360, Platform, Data 360, Agentforce, Slack, and emerging surfaces.

Reporting to the EVP, Chief Experience Officer, this executive will move Research further upstream into enterprise and product strategy while extending evaluation through implementation, production, and longitudinal use.

What you will lead - 4 Connected Capabilities:

• Enterprise Experience Intelligence + Foresight. Foundational domain research, longitudinal customer programs, strategic opportunity intelligence, ecosystem and competitive synthesis, failed-adoption and win/loss evidence, foresight, and executive synthesis.
• Portfolio Research + Insights. Deeply embedded research leadership and teams serving Salesforce's major product portfolios while operating within one enterprise agenda, talent system, evidence standard, and knowledge environment.
• Human-Agent Research, Evaluation + Measurement. Human factors, behavioral science, trust and delegation, agent-behavior evaluation, scenario and rubric development, production-evidence interpretation, and experience-outcome measurement.
• Research Operations + Knowledge. Participant systems, customer access, governance and ethics, methods and standards, knowledge infrastructure, evidence taxonomy, tooling, vendors, and research program operations.

What you will do

• Establish one enterprise Research + Insights agenda tied to Salesforce's most consequential customer, product, platform, architecture, and business decisions.
• Build Experience Intelligence as a live, cumulative understanding of how customers, industries, organizations, roles, and work actually operate and how they change over time.
• Ensure foundational, generative, and evaluative research shape product strategy before solution direction and roadmap commitments harden.
• Create a continuous evaluation system spanning early concepts, working prototypes, implementations, shipped products, production behavior, and longitudinal customer outcomes.
• Define the research and measurement models Salesforce needs for human-agent collaboration, including trust, delegation, autonomy, authority, observability, intervention, correction, escalation, learning, and recovery.
• Integrate relevant evidence across Product Analytics, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Support, Services, Trust, implementation, and market intelligence without duplicating those organizations or collapsing distinct evidence into one score.
• Build a durable knowledge system that makes customer and product evidence searchable, reusable, appropriately contextualized, and available at the moment consequential decisions are made.
• Protect the independence and integrity of customer evidence, including confidence, limitations, contradictions, and unresolved questions, even when the findings challenge a committed direction.
• Recruit and develop an exceptional bench of research leaders, distinguished researchers, behavioral scientists, measurement experts, research technologists, knowledge architects, and Research Operations talent.

What success looks like

Within the first year, Research should operate as an enterprise decision system: close enough to change the work and independent enough to challenge it.

• A single enterprise research agenda is actively shaping priority product, portfolio, architecture, and business decisions.
• Live domain and work models are in place for the highest-priority areas and are changing what teams choose to build or stop.
• A continuous evaluation model connects prototypes, production behavior, implementation evidence, customer outcomes, and longitudinal learning.
• Human-agent research and measurement are informing Agentforce, Slack, Experience Architecture, and selected portfolio experiences.
• Evidence from implementation, support, service, win/loss, telemetry, and direct research is entering decisions with clear provenance and interpretation.
• The research knowledge environment is reducing duplicated discovery and making prior evidence available without stripping it of context.
• Salesforce has one strong Research leadership and talent system, with deep portfolio proximity and a credible distinguished-practitioner bench.
• Unsupported directions are redirected or stopped before major investment because the evidence is timely, credible, and consequential.

What you bring

• A record of leading Research across a complex, multi-product enterprise, platform, or ecosystem at significant scale.
• Evidence that research you personally led changed product strategy, architecture, investment, operating decisions, or shipped experiences, not merely stakeholder understanding.
• Deep expertise across qualitative research, behavioral science, mixed methods, experimentation, measurement, and interpretation of product and production data.
• Meaningful experience with AI, automation, human factors, intelligent systems, trust, or human-machine collaboration.
• The ability to reconstruct how complex domains and people actually work across roles, systems, incentives, constraints, implementations, and time.
• Demonstrated strength in foundational research, generative product influence, continuous evaluation, and enterprise synthesis.
• Experience integrating qualitative, quantitative, behavioral, commercial, implementation, and service evidence without overstating certainty or confusing correlation with customer understanding.
• Executive presence and organizational courage sufficient to challenge powerful stakeholders, protect difficult findings, and redirect consequential decisions.
• Experience leading a centrally connected research organization with senior portfolio leaders and deeply embedded teams.
• A record of identifying, recruiting, and developing exceptional research leaders and distinguished practitioners.

Your leadership signature

You are a truth-teller with product consequence. You combine deep curiosity and methodological rigor with exceptional product judgment. You can hold contradiction, identify the non-obvious implication, and make complex evidence clear without manufacturing certainty.

You are independent without becoming distant from the work, and influential without allowing stakeholder preference to rewrite what is true.

Why this role matters

The Agentic Enterprise introduces questions of trust, authority, delegation, learning, and organizational change that no existing product metric can answer alone. This role will ensure Salesforce builds from a continuously updated understanding of customers and real work, and that the company learns as its products and agents change. The right leader will make customer truth a durable source of strategic and product advantage.