THE NEXT CHAPTER OF RESEARCH

Meet the
Customer Insights
Engineer.

The next competitive advantage won’t come from knowing what everyone else knows. It will come from building a better way to learn.

Explore the role ↘

FROM INDIVIDUAL STUDIES

Question→Study→Report■

A project ends. The next question starts over.

TO CONTINUOUS CUSTOMER LEARNING

Listen→Connect→Decide→Act

Learn & refine

01 / THE OPPORTUNITY

When everyone has
the same answers,
ask better questions.

AI makes existing information easier to find, combine, and use. But access to the same information is not the same as an advantage.

The more accessible that knowledge becomes, the more interesting a different question gets: what can your organization learn that nobody else knows?

That’s the opportunity for original customer research. And it calls for someone who can make learning a repeatable part of how a business works.

THE INFORMATION EVERYONE CAN ACCESS

Shared inputs.Public reports. Search results. Common models.

THE QUESTIONS ONLY YOU HAVE ASKED

A different starting point.Your customers. Their context. Original evidence.

THE ROLE WE’RE PROPOSING

A researcher’s judgment.
A builder’s mindset.
A business that keeps learning.

Customer Insights Engineer ^n.

Someone who builds and maintains systems that turn original customer evidence into better business decisions.

02 / THE SYSTEM

Don’t just deliver
the next study.
Build the next loop.

A study answers a question at a moment in time. A learning system creates a reliable way to ask, listen, connect, decide—and ask again.

The Customer Insights Engineer owns the connections. They know what to automate, where judgment matters, and when a signal needs a deeper investigation.

WHAT COULD THIS LOOK LIKE?ILLUSTRATIVE WORKFLOWS

Listen

Invite a relevant mix of won and lost buyers to share what drove their decision.

Connect

Link their answers to account context, deal stage, and the alternatives they considered.

Decide

Bring reviewed evidence to the team making the next positioning or product decision.

Learn

Follow the next cohort. Test whether the pattern holds and refine the questions.

THE NEXT DECISION STARTS WITH WHAT YOU’VE ALREADY LEARNED

HUMAN JUDGMENT, THROUGHOUT

Who didn’t respond? Are sales notes being mistaken for customer evidence? Is the sample broad enough to support a change?

Automate the repetition.
Keep the research judgment.

03 / THE VALUE

Research
Alpha.

Original, validated knowledge that helps a company make better decisions than it could with the information everyone else has.

In investing, alpha is the return you earn beyond the market. In research, it's what you know that the market doesn't.

Original

Did we learn something beyond what’s publicly available?

Credible

Does the evidence support the conclusion we’re drawing?

Consequential

What decision changes because we know this?

Differentiating

Does this help us make a better choice than a competitor?

FOUR TESTS FOR THE WORK Not more information. More informed decisions.

04 / MAKE IT A ROLE

The job description
for what
comes next.

Some people are already doing this work. Others are building toward it. Giving it a name makes the responsibility easier to recognize, develop, and hire for.

Here’s a starting point for teams ready to make continuous customer learning someone’s job.

EMPORIA / A PROPOSED ROLE

Customer
Insights Engineer

ALTERNATE TITLES

Research Systems Lead · Insights Engineer · ResearchOps Engineer

Build the systems that help a business keep learning from its customers.

The purpose of the role

Help the organization make better decisions by building dependable systems for learning directly from customers.

The Customer Insights Engineer combines research judgment with technical fluency. They turn recurring business questions into repeatable research workflows, connect customer evidence with relevant business data, and help teams apply what they learn.

What you’ll own

Identify recurring decisions that would benefit from better customer evidence.
Design research programs that combine interviews, surveys, and relevant behavioral or commercial data.
Build and maintain workflows for participant recruitment, data collection, analysis, and distribution of findings.
Partner with data and engineering teams to connect research with CRM and product data using appropriate permissions and safeguards.
Define quality checks for participant relevance, sampling, data integrity, and interpretation.
Use automation and AI where they improve the process, with human review where judgment matters.
Make evidence traceable: teams should understand where a finding came from, its limitations, and when it needs refreshing.
Evaluate whether the work improves decisions, and retire workflows that no longer create value.

What you bring

Experience designing and conducting customer research.
Strong judgment about research methods, bias, uncertainty, and the limits of a dataset.
Practical fluency with data tools and workflow automation. You may use SQL, APIs, scripting, or no-code tools; the appropriate approach depends on the problem.
The ability to translate a business question into a research plan and a process people can maintain.
Clear communication and experience working across research, product, marketing, sales, or data teams.
Care for participant experience, consent, privacy, and responsible use of customer information.

You could come from research, ResearchOps, analytics, or a technical discipline. You should be able to demonstrate both research judgment and the ability to build useful systems.

Your first 90 days

01—30

Understand how customer evidence reaches decision-makers. Choose one recurring, consequential question with a business partner.

31—60

Launch a focused pilot. Document its methods, limitations, and the effort required to sustain it.

61—90

Assess its usefulness in a real decision. Refine the process and agree on what should happen next.

How we’ll measure success

Relevant, credible evidence reaches the right decision at the right time. We’ll assess research quality, time to useful evidence, use in decisions, and the effort required to sustain the process—not simply the number of studies or automated outputs.

How the role fits

You’ll work closely with researchers, ResearchOps, data and engineering teams, and business decision-makers. The role needs access to these partners and a clear business sponsor; its scope should match the resources available.

A FEW GOOD QUESTIONS

The role,
explained.

What is a Customer Insights Engineer?

A Customer Insights Engineer builds and maintains systems that turn original customer evidence into better business decisions. The role combines research judgment with technical fluency to connect recruitment, data collection, analysis, and the application of findings into a continuous learning process.

How is a Customer Insights Engineer different from ResearchOps?

ResearchOps enables research through the people, processes, tools, and governance that support it. In Emporia’s proposed model, the Customer Insights Engineer focuses on designing and maintaining the end-to-end learning workflows that connect customer evidence to recurring business decisions. The roles overlap and work closely together; the distinction is a focus, not a fixed boundary.

BUILD YOUR RESEARCH ALPHA

Your next advantage
starts with a better question.

Better access to the right people. Stronger evidence. Systems that keep learning. This is the future of research we want to help build.

Talk to Emporia ↗