Community Research Specialist

About Us Fandom is home to the world’s largest collection of fan communities, where millions of users come together to celebrate their favorite entertainment and gaming franchises. Our platform is built on collaboration, passion, and deep fan engagement, empowering users to contribute, connect, and shape the stories they love. Fandom’s Community team plays a crucial role in shaping the fan experience across our vast network of wikis and entertainment hubs. As the home for millions of passionate users, we are focused on fostering deeper engagement, broadening our reach, and creating dynamic, interactive spaces that cater to evolving fan behaviors. Our goal is to ensure that communities not only remain a trusted source of knowledge but also provide meaningful and rewarding experiences for contributors and fans alike. About this Role We are seeking a Community Research Specialist to join our team. This role is dedicated to bridging the gap between community sentiment and product development. You will be the primary person responsible for formalizing how we analyze user feedback, investigate community needs, and translate those insights into actionable recommendations for our teams. This role informs decision-making through structured community research and insights, but does not directly own product prioritization, roadmap decisions, or frontline community support operations. Your work will directly support our 2026 North Star goals, specifically in creating a formal feedback framework and identifying growth opportunities across our 250,000+ wikis. You’ll partner directly with Product, Community Operations, Data Science and Analytics to shape the community strategy through robust, repeatable research. You should have a "data-first" mindset, a passion for fan culture, and the ability to turn qualitative conversations into quantitative trends. You Will… Research User Insights Conduct qualitative and quantitative research to identify user behaviors, motivations, and unmet needs. Organize and facilitate community discussions, focus groups, and roundtables to gather deep feedback on specific product themes or platform updates. Design, deploy, and analyze targeted user surveys to validate hypotheses and measure sentiment on specific initiatives. Analyze recurring themes in community discussions to categorize "voice of the customer" trends. Map end-to-end user journeys to identify friction points and opportunities for better platform engagement and support. Data Analysis Support Optimization Manage the Community Zendesk feedback queue, ensuring that user ideas, concerns, and feedback are acknowledged, categorized and synthesized. Help segment our user base (from core contributors to casual visitors) to provide tailored insights for different platform experiences. Collaborate with the Community Managers and others to identify "high-potential" communities for growth and retention. Product Collaboration Tooling Act as the bridge for insight visibility; ensure feedback and feature requests are clearly captured and communicated through Zendesk and JIRA. Work closely with Product and Community teams to provide data-backed solutions for detected community pain points. Contribute to the creation of a unified community database that tracks previous decisions, tools, power users, and user feedback. Suggest and help implement AI-powered or automated tools to streamline community reporting and sentiment tracking. What Success Looks Like Actionable Data: Product and Community teams receive regular, clear reports that influence the roadmap and strategy. Streamlined Feedback Loop: A functional workflow between community and our internal tools that ensures community ideas are prioritized and tracked within the product development cycle. Formalized Frameworks: Successful establishment of a feedback framework that delivers consistent data for innovation. Deep Empathy: Internal stakeholders have a clearer, segmented unde ... (truncated, view full listing at source)