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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Web Research Manager

💰 $ - $

🎯 Role Definition

The Web Research Manager leads internet-based research and market intelligence efforts to deliver accurate, actionable insights for product, marketing, sales, and executive stakeholders. This role combines team leadership, research methodology design, web scraping and data collection operations, quality assurance, and strategic analysis to support competitive intelligence, market sizing, lead enrichment, SEO insights, and content research. The ideal candidate balances technical fluency (web scraping, APIs, SQL, data pipelines) with strong stakeholder management, process design, and data governance expertise.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Web Research Analyst / Internet Researcher
  • Market Research Analyst or Competitive Intelligence Analyst
  • Data Analyst with internet research focus

Advancement To:

  • Senior Web Research Manager / Head of Web Research
  • Director of Market Intelligence or Competitive Intelligence
  • Head of Research Operations or Insights & Analytics

Lateral Moves:

  • Product Insights Manager
  • SEO Research Lead
  • Sales Intelligence / Revenue Operations Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of web researchers, internet analysts, and scraping engineers; define roles, run performance reviews, and set development plans to improve research quality and throughput.
  • Define and operationalize web research methodologies and standard operating procedures for online data collection, cleansing, enrichment, and annotation to ensure reproducible, auditable insights.
  • Design, prioritize, and manage a roadmap of research projects and data pipeline initiatives aligned to business goals (competitive intelligence, product insights, lead enrichment, content strategy, SEO research).
  • Architect and oversee web scraping and data ingestion workflows using tools and frameworks (e.g., Python, Scrapy, Selenium, BeautifulSoup, headless browsers, APIs) and coordinate with engineering teams for scale and reliability.
  • Establish and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) for the web research function — data freshness, coverage, accuracy, cost per record, turnaround time, and automation rate — and report performance to stakeholders.
  • Conduct high-impact competitive intelligence and market landscape studies by synthesizing website signals, public filings, job postings, pricing pages, reviews, social feeds, and third-party datasets into executive summaries and tactical recommendations.
  • Implement rigorous data quality assurance (QA) processes including validation rules, deduplication, anomaly detection, and manual review workflows to maintain high trust in web-sourced data.
  • Manage vendor relationships and third-party data subscriptions (web monitoring, SERP trackers, commercial datasets); negotiate contracts and evaluate ROI against internal tooling options.
  • Collaborate with Product, Marketing, Sales, and Legal partners to translate business questions into scalable research designs and ensure research outputs are usable and compliant.
  • Build and maintain searchable research repositories, taxonomies, and ontologies to accelerate repeatable analysis and ensure knowledge transfer across teams.
  • Lead SERP analysis, backlink and referral tracking, and competitor content audits to surface SEO and content opportunities for marketing and product teams.
  • Oversee privacy and compliance practices for web research operations, including GDPR, CCPA and site terms of service considerations; implement consent-aware data collection approaches and data retention policies.
  • Drive end-to-end lead enrichment programs using web signals, corporate registries, events, and social profiles to improve sales pipeline quality and conversion rates.
  • Translate raw web data into dashboards, automated reports, and narrative briefs using visualization tools (Tableau, Power BI, Looker) and templated reporting to support decision making.
  • Partner with engineering to productionize reliable, monitored data pipelines and to troubleshoot scale issues, rate-limiting, CAPTCHAs, and infrastructure constraints.
  • Prioritize and scope ad-hoc intelligence requests; balance rapid investigative research with longer-term strategic projects and automation investments.
  • Evaluate and pilot new web research platforms, scraping frameworks, and AI-assisted intelligence tools to reduce manual effort and increase insight velocity.
  • Create playbooks and training programs to upskill internal teams on web research best practices, sourcing ethics, and interpretation of online signals.
  • Control and track research budgets, headcount planning, and vendor spend; provide forecasting and cost-benefit analysis for tooling and third-party data.
  • Synthesize cross-channel online signals (web, social, forums, app stores) into unified competitor and market models to inform pricing, roadmap, and GTM decisions.
  • Ensure reproducibility and traceability of research outputs by enforcing metadata standards, dataset versioning, and clear provenance for each element of analysis.
  • Present findings and strategic recommendations to senior leadership, tailoring narrative and visualizations for audience needs and decision horizons.
  • Drive continuous improvement by measuring research impact (influence on conversion, retention, product decisions) and iterating on processes and tooling to maximize ROI.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Maintain documentation of data sources, scraping logic, and research templates for auditability and knowledge sharing.
  • Coordinate cross-functional pilots that combine web data with internal CRM and product telemetry for richer insights.
  • Facilitate vendor evaluations, proof-of-concepts, and pilot projects for intelligence and monitoring platforms.
  • Assist Legal and Compliance teams with assessments related to data collection methods and supplier contracts.
  • Establish escalation procedures for data incidents, security concerns, and major outages affecting research delivery.
  • Create and maintain sample libraries, labeled datasets, and training data used for ML/AI models that leverage web signals.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Advanced web research and internet data collection techniques, including web scraping (Scrapy, BeautifulSoup), headless browsers, and automation frameworks (Selenium, Playwright).
  • Proficiency in Python for data extraction, parsing, and ETL scripting; familiarity with libraries for HTTP requests, HTML parsing, and scheduling.
  • Strong SQL skills for dataset exploration, joins, aggregation, and feeding downstream analytics and dashboards.
  • Experience with APIs, rate limiting strategies, OAuth, pagination, and robust error handling for production data ingestion.
  • Data cleaning, normalization, entity resolution, and de-duplication best practices to create high-quality research datasets.
  • Familiarity with SEO and competitive analysis tools (Google Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, SimilarWeb) and SERP analysis methodologies.
  • Experience building or supervising data pipelines and orchestration using tools like Airflow, Prefect, or cloud-native services.
  • Data visualization and reporting skills using Tableau, Power BI, Looker, or equivalent; ability to build repeatable dashboards and narrative reporting.
  • Knowledge of data privacy, regulatory constraints (GDPR, CCPA), and ethical web research practices; experience liaising with legal/compliance teams.
  • Hands-on experience with spreadsheet modeling (Excel/Google Sheets), including pivot tables, advanced formulas, and macros for ad-hoc analysis.
  • Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and storage solutions for large web datasets; basic understanding of containerization (Docker) and monitoring.
  • Experience managing vendor data subscriptions, negotiating SLAs, and evaluating third-party data quality and coverage.

Soft Skills

  • Strong leadership and people-management skills: coaching, feedback, hiring, and developing high-performing research teams.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication; able to translate complex technical findings into concise, business-focused recommendations.
  • Strategic thinking with the ability to prioritize projects that deliver measurable business impact and align with company objectives.
  • Stakeholder management and collaboration across cross-functional teams (Product, Marketing, Sales, Legal, Engineering).
  • High attention to detail and a rigorous mindset for data quality, reproducibility, and provenance.
  • Problem-solving and troubleshooting aptitude when facing anti-scraping measures, data gaps, or ambiguous research questions.
  • Time management and project planning skills to juggle long-term initiatives with urgent intelligence requests.
  • Adaptability and continuous-learning orientation to stay current with web technologies, privacy rules, and intelligence tools.
  • Coaching and training ability to upskill non-technical stakeholders on interpreting web-based signals and reports.
  • Ethical judgement and sound decision-making in interpreting and disseminating potentially sensitive online information.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in a relevant field (e.g., Information Science, Data Science, Market Research, Business, Computer Science, Journalism).

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree or advanced coursework in Data Analytics, Market Research, Information Systems, or related programs.
  • Certifications in data analytics, SEO, or competitive intelligence (desirable but not required).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Information Science / Library Science
  • Data Science / Analytics
  • Market Research / Economics
  • Computer Science / Software Engineering
  • Business / Marketing / Communications
  • Journalism / Research Methods

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3–8 years of professional experience in web research, market intelligence, competitive research, or data operations.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years with demonstrable experience managing teams and end-to-end web research programs, plus hands-on experience with scraping, APIs, and dashboarding. Experience integrating web-sourced data into revenue, product, or marketing workflows is highly desirable.
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