Manager of Strategic Insights & Research

About The Institutes

Located in beautiful Malvern, Pennsylvania, The Institutes® are a not-for-profit comprised of diverse affiliates that educate, elevate, and connect people in the essential disciplines of risk management and insurance. Through products and services offered by our nearly 20 affiliated business units, people and organizations are empowered to help those in need with a focus on understanding, predicting, and preventing losses to create a more resilient world.

Additionally, we understand the importance of work-life balance-in 2025 Philly.com named us a Top Workplace for the tenth year and USA Today named us a USA Top Workplace for the third year. We provide excellent benefits and a friendly, team-focused work environment to drive employee engagement.

Manager, Strategic Insights & Research

The Manager of Strategic Insights & Research will serve as a strategic partner to business and product leadership, leading the development of an AI-enabled, continuously learning insights function. This role will integrate primary research, enterprise data, and advanced analytics to deliver decision-support capabilities that enhance the speed, confidence and quality of business decisions.

Additionally, this position will advance the Enterprise Research 2.0 vision by embedding actionable insights into workflows, commercialization strategies, and customer experiences, driving more informed decision-making and supporting product innovation and market positioning.

What You'll Do:

1. Orchestrate multi-source insight generation across primary research, enterprise data, and external intelligence to generate insights that inform business decisions and support company growth; Identify new research opportunities aligned with enterprise business objectives; Design high-impact insight initiatives aligned to product, pricing, and growth strategies with clear objectives, timelines, and expectations from stakeholders
2. Support the VP of Enterprise Research in synthesizing research findings and communicating strategic implications; Act as a strategic partner to business, product, and marketing leaders to shape decisions, not just inputs.
3. Support enterprise research goals by developing shared research instruments, templates, and guidance rooted in best practices; Drive measurable business outcomes (e.g., pricing optimization, product-market fit, customer growth).
4. Lead multi-modal and AI-augmented research approaches, including rapid testing and experimentation, focus groups, and third-party panel studies, and present insights in actionable formats; Utilize AI-assisted research techniques where appropriate to generate insights from large datasets or hard-to-reach populations.
5. Apply data science and predictive modeling techniques to research findings in support of strategic planning, pricing exercises, and goal calibrations; Develop dynamic, data-driven customer and market models continuously refined through behavioral data.
6. Build and maintain scalable insight systems and reusable knowledge assets integrated into enterprise platforms; Build pipelines that integrate survey, behavioral, and transactional data; Develop reusable research agents and prompt libraries.
7. Lead the adoption of AI-native research workflows, including prompt libraries, research agents, and automated insight generation; Establish standards for AI-assisted research quality, bias mitigation to ensure accuracy, methodological soundness, and business relevance; Continuously evaluate and deploy emerging tools to scale insight generation and reduce cycle times.
8. Embed research outputs into dashboards, copilots, and internal AI tools to enable real-time decision support; Partner with IT/Data teams to integrate insights into enterprise systems; Embed insights into product, marketing, and customer workflows.
9. Transition research from project-based to always-on intelligence; Accelerate decision-making speed and confidence across the enterprise; Increase reuse and scalability of research insights.

What We're Looking For:

• A Minimum of a bachelor's degree in business, economics, or the social sciences required.
• A graduate degree in education, business, economics, or social sciences preferred.
• Must have 8+ years of experience leading mixed-methods research involving:
• Research design
• Partnerships/collaboration with internal and third-party stakeholders
• Development of data instruments
• Collection and analysis of original data
• 8+ years of writing research articles or reports and making oral presentations of research results, with a focus on making research accessible and providing stakeholders with actionable intelligence.
• 5+ years working in an academic or business organization preferred.
• 5+ years' experience with modern analytics and tools (e.g., Python, AI copilots, prompt frameworks, experimentation tools)
• 5+ years utilizing Tableau or similar data visualization software
• Experience working with database technologies, including:
• Coding in SQL to fulfill data requests
• Generating new relational tables
• Experience integrating insights into business systems and dashboards.

Key Competencies

• AI-augmented research design and insight generation
• Strong communication skills, especially in delivering and distributing research findings
• Advanced mixed-methods research skills
• Ability to manage multiple major projects simultaneously
• Collaborating across multiple business units and third-party stakeholders
• Database management
• Systems thinking and workflow integration
• Flexibility
• Independently motivated
• Basic data science and predictive modeling capabilities is a bonus
• Experience with database technologies, specifically with query languages is a bonus

The Best Part? The Benefits! To ensure the importance of work-life balance, employees enjoy excellent benefits, including:

• 401(k) plan with company contribution up to 16%
• Generous time off package that includes paid vacation, personal, sick, and holidays
• Paid maternity and parental leave
• Tuition reimbursement
• Medical, dental, vision, and prescription coverage

Equal Opportunity Employer
This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws. For further information, please review the Know Your Rights notice from the Department of Labor.