Senior Manager, Customer Insights

7-Eleven is an iconic family of brands with over 86,000 locations, surpassing every retailer in the world. We revolutionize convenience, restaurants, and fuel through cutting-edge innovation — working hard to be the customer's first choice. 7-Eleven empowers our employees to "activate awesome" and make a meaningful impact in their stores and communities every day. If you're ready to grow, lead, and make a difference, come join our team and help shape the future of convenience.

JOB SUMMARY: We are seeking a Senior Manager, Customer Insights to lead and elevate our Customer Insights function, ensuring insights are strategically embedded across the organization and directly influence key business decisions.

This is a primary research role. Our Analytics team owns behavioral, transactional, and performance data; Customer Insights owns understanding why customers think, choose, and behave the way they do — through qualitative and quantitative research, customer feedback, and market intelligence. The two functions partner closely so the business gets one coherent story about the customer.

This role owns the Customer Insights research roadmap and project pipeline, aligning research investments with enterprise priorities and delivering measurable business impact. The ideal candidate is a strategic thought partner who proactively identifies knowledge gaps and recommends research that influences growth, innovation, customer experience, loyalty, merchandising, and brand strategy. They approach the work with an ownership mindset — treating every project as a business investment, and pressure-testing whether a question can be answered faster or more efficiently through existing research, secondary sources, or a partnership with Analytics.

This individual thrives in a fast-paced retail environment, operating with urgency to deliver decision-ready answers on the timelines the business actually needs, and creating clarity where the question itself is still ambiguous. They serve as a trusted advisor to senior leaders across Marketing, Merchandising, Operations, Loyalty, and Digital.

Key Duties And Responsibilities:

• Strategy and Roadmap Ownership
• Customer Foresight and Competitive Intelligence
• Cross-Functional Partnership and Influence
• Research Design and Execution
• Team Leadership
• Continuous Improvement

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:
EDUCATION: Bachelors / 4 yr degree
YEARS OF EXPERIENCE: 8+ yrs
YEARS OF MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCE: NA
SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS:

• Bachelor's degree in business administration, behavior science, customer research, marketing, finance, statistics, economics, or a related field.
• 8-10+ years of experience in Customer Insights, Consumer Insights, or Market Research.
• Demonstrated experience building and managing strategic research roadmaps aligned to business objectives.
• Experience leading, coaching, and developing high-performing research teams.
• Proven ability to influence senior and executive stakeholders through storytelling and customer-centric recommendations, including leading presentations with executives.
• Deep expertise across qualitative and quantitative methodologies — survey design and sampling, tracking and brand health studies, concept and product testing, attitudinal segmentation, customer journey research, focus groups and in-depth interviews, and trade-off methods such as conjoint or MaxDiff.
• Experience developing and applying need-state, demand-space, or jobs-to-be-done frameworks, and using them to guide innovation, assortment, or brand decisions.
• Strong business acumen with the ability to connect customer insights to financial, operational, and strategic outcomes.
• Comfort operating with ambiguity and shaping clear recommendations from incomplete information.
• Track record of improving how a function works — introducing processes, tools, or approaches that increased speed, quality, or efficiency.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills, with the ability to present research concisely and persuasively.
• Ability to solve problems both independently and as part of a team through a structured approach.

• Experience running ongoing customer satisfaction or experience measurement programs on platforms such as Qualtrics, Alida, Medallia, Mintel, Nielseniq and etc.
• Familiarity with AI-enabled and agile research approaches, and a point of view on where they add value versus where traditional primary research is required.
• Experience in retail, convenience, grocery, restaurant, or CPG — or another high-velocity, multi-unit environment.
• Experience integrating primary research and secondary research findings with loyalty, CRM, behavioral, or transactional datasets to create a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior.
• Experience with syndicated and secondary research sources for category, trend, and competitive intelligence.
• Experience with trend, foresight, or futures work — cultural and consumption trend tracking, scenario thinking, or emerging-behavior research.
• Experience partnering with loyalty, CRM, or analytics teams to combine survey research with first-party customer data.