Jess Nichols

Jess Nichols manages & leads research to create customer focused experiences.

I am a strategy, research & insights leader that advocates for customers throughout product and experiences. My focus is to discover actionable insights that fuel product teams to build easy, relevant and right solutions that have our customers’ needs woven throughout the experience.

I am lucky to have a blend of both IC and Manager capabilities and can dive into each area based on organizational needs to set up research for success. As an individual contributor, I specialize in foundational and exploratory research - bringing clarity and actionable frameworks to ambiguous problem spaces. As a people manager, I build research teams from 0 to 1 - laying foundational people, process and technology infrastructure; while ensuring teams of researchers are working on meaningful and impactful opportunities to supercharge their careers.

I am passionate about design thinking approaches to ensure a true customer focus in how we create and build; and have led initiatives throughout my career to operationalize these approaches - most recently igniting a Design Sprint culture at Twitter.

I have experience working collaboratively with cross-functional teams (e.g. Engineering, Product, Design) and in service delivery teams in B2C, B2B and B2E environments. My extensive global (ten countries across four continents) and cross-industry focus help me continually bring the best and most impactful methodologies and outputs to customers and stakeholders.

Throughout my career I have led research to define customer-centered experiences at many leading organizations, including Twitter, Uber, A Cloud Guru/Pluralsight, Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil, Unilever, Rackspace, El Puerto de Liverpool, Dovetail, Salesforce.com, Commonwealth of Kentucky, Kaiser Permanente, Telstra, Tektronix, Nu Skin, Celgene, CSL Behring, Australia Post, Medibank Private, Accor Hotels, Deloitte Australia, Queensland Police Service, The Department of Human Services (AU), Rebel Sport, APN Online, OneSteel and Queensland Sugar.

Born in Melbourne and raised in Sydney; I returned back to Australia in 2020 after several years living in San Francisco. I am based in Sydney.