The Open Home Foundation is seeking a Market Researcher to help us answer the big questions: Who are our potential users? Where is the smart home industry headed? What makes our ecosystem different – and better – than Big Tech?
You will work alongside our user researcher as part of the research unit of the team that will help bring clarity to decision-making with evidence-based insights, through mixed method research with a focus on quantitative, and help shape our product strategy, from validating our “outgrower” hypothesis to identifying market segments, sizing addressable markets, and helping to determine the pricing of our hardware products. Your insights will directly inform our strategic decision-making, resulting in improvements to the roadmaps and features in the projects in the Open Home ecosystem, partner programs such as ‘Works With Home Assistant’, as well as the Home Assistant-branded services and hardware products created by our commercial partners, like Nabu Casa.
You will work closely with both the Product & Design team and the Marketing team. The former is responsible for planning the future roadmap of the foundation’s projects and leading us towards our vision, while the latter is responsible for connecting these projects with the people who benefit from them most: users, contributors, and partners. You will coordinate your work with our user researcher as part of the research unit, report to both teams, and be managed by our Product Lead.

ABOUT US

The Open Home Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Switzerland, with the objective of fighting for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. It does this by supporting the development of open-source projects, and open connectivity and communication standards.

A big part of this is Home Assistant, the biggest open-source project in number of contributors, but the Open Home Foundation also owns or collaborates with other projects important to promoting privacy, choice, and sustainability in the smart home, like:

• Open hardware tools (e.g., ESPHome, ESP Web Tools)
• Open standards (e.g., Python Matter Server, Z-Wave JS, ZigPy, BTHome, Improv Wi-Fi)
• Open voice (e.g., Rhasspy, Wyoming Protocol, Piper)

WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO DO

• Product viability and desirability research: Conduct market research to assess the viability, user interest, product-market fit, and brand image of proposed features and products, such as our hardware products (smart home hub, voice satellites) and software projects (Home Assistant Cloud, Home Assistant, ESPHome, Music Assistant, and more), and then turn into actionable insights that inform our product roadmap, go-to-market strategies, and community initiatives.
• Support continuous discovery: Work alongside our user researcher to uncover needs, problems, and opportunities in our target markets with a focus on quantitative methods such as surveys, usage analysis, and more.
• Size and segment the market: Analyze the B2C smart home market landscape across software, hardware, and cloud offerings. Help define market segments and personas of our potential users, as well as the value proposition of what differentiates our products and where we deliver the most value. Inform our communication strategy based on our insights on different segments and channels.
• Own the Smart Home Landscape Report: Monitor competitors, adjacent industries, and emerging technologies, and create regular reports analyzing trends in the smart home space internationally, highlighting how the Open Home ecosystem compares to or outpaces Big Tech.
• Product launch testing: Pre-test aspects of product launches and other campaigns when it comes to positioning, messaging, and asset content. Help define success metrics and evaluate campaigns on them post-launch.
• Brand health metrics: Track long-term brand metrics such as brand image and brand awareness in our market and relevant segments. Benchmark these results against competitors, report trends over time, and provide insights to help understand and improve these metrics.
• Surface product insights ethically: Unify analytics and data sources to help us understand our users better, with strong attention to privacy, transparency, and data ownership that aligns with the values of our Foundation—we pride ourselves for respecting our users and requiring users to actively give consent before their data can be collected or used. Present findings in an accessible manner that help both internal teams and the broader contributor community understand what we’re learning and why it matters.